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'5 "^ 



THE REFLECTIONS 
of a LONELY MAN 



THE REFLECTIONS 



LONELY MAN 



By A. C. M. 




^ A 

i 



CHICAGO 

A. C. McCLURG & CO. 

1903 



Copyright 

By a. C. McClurg & Co. 

1903 



]->'K'- 



Published April 18, 1903 







THE LiERARY OF 
CONGRESS, 






Two Copies Received 






MAY 4 1903 






Copyright Entry 


]B4)} 


• • «• 


gi^s^ a^ xxc No. 

* COPY 8. 


^ * e * 6 * ' 




I ; 



UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON 
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 



CONTENTS 

Page 

I. Preliminary Musings ..... 3 

II. The Vantage Ground of Loneliness 18 

III. Books, Doctors, Idealism, Language, 

AND Government 55 

IV. The Search for Satisfaction . . . 124 
V. The Release from Pain 209 



THE REFLECTIONS of 

A LONELY MAN 




I 



PRELIMINARY MUSINGS 



WHEN a man has just been well fed, 
and sits in the easy comfort of his 
smoking-jacket and slippers, he likes to toy 
a while with thought before he settles down 
to the serious business of thinking, as the 
wind of a late November afternoon eddies in 
the fence-corners and amorously dallies with 
the leaves, before it forms itself into a steady 
gale, which, let us hope, will not blow all the 
leaves away. So the Lonely Man sits gazing 
into his gas fire, while his fancy playfully 
eddies in the various nooks and fence-corners 
of creation ; and, from gazing into the fire, 
he presently falls to musing about it. 
3 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

A wood fire might be more cheerful, but 
gas is certainly more convenient than wood, 
and this is an age 6f convenient things ; but 
the Lonely Man reflects, as he gazes into the 
quivering redness of the burning gas, that 
the increasing convenience of things has 
been attained at some sacrifice of cheerful- 
ness and beauty. The very existence of a 
fireplace in the presence of the steam heat 
and the electric lights in this room is a tacit 
admission of the loss, and a silent protest 
against it. The fireplace is a tribute to the 
cheerful picturesqueness of an earlier age 
and a cruder civilization. Then the fire- 
place was cheerful only because it was neces- 
sary ; now it is necessary only because it is 
cheerful. 

On the whole, the burning gas is not a 
bad substitute for the blazing logs of earlier 
times. There may be less poetry in turning 
a thumbscrew than there is in poking a 
burning log, but there is also less danger of 
soiling one's fingers and burning holes in 
4 



PRELIMINARY MUSINGS 



the carpet. It may be less interesting to 
apply a match to the ragged surface of asbes- 
tos than it is to construct a stratified mass of 
combustibles and then guess whether the tiny 
flame in the shavings at the bottom will ever 
reach the logs at the top, but it is certainly 
less frequently disappointing. 

There is no noisy crackling in this fire- 
place ; there are no showers of sparks ; there 
is no gradual dying out of the flame to re- 
mind one of the decay of one's own am- 
bitions ; and there are no ashes left to 
smoulder and grow cold in the grate and 
remind one of the skeletons of one's dead 
hopes. This fire starts quickly and burns 
with a constancy which surpasses that of 
human friendship, till, at the will of the 
Lonely Man, it makes its sudden exit into 
nothingness. 

It is no mean companion while it lasts. 

It lights and warms and cheers the room 

with its friendly radiance, while the sleet 

beats an endless tattoo on the windows and 

5 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

the breath of winter whistles past the corners 
of the house. The gentle, fluttering noise 
of the fire seems like the audible blinking of 
its bright eyes, and blends harmoniously with 
the moan and roar and rattle of the winter 
night. 

The mere thickness of a window-pane 
separates the rudeness of the storm from the 
cozy comfort of the room, yet this only makes 
the room seem brighter and the fire seem 
warmer. The fluttering voice of the fire 
seems like a quiet assurance of the potency 
of gentleness over the noisy bluster in the 
outer cold and darkness, while the wailing of 
the storm is a confession of its own impo- 
tence. 

Secure in his coziness, the Lonely Man 
lights his briar pipe and abandons himself to 
the sensuous enjoyment of physical comfort 
and the keener delight of undisturbed medi- 
tation. The pipe is a gentle promoter of 
both. The rich brown hue of its generous 
bowl and the deep indentations of its mouth- 
6 



PRELIMINARY MUSINGS 



piece give evidence of the long and faithful 
service which it has performed, and awaken 
pleasing expectations of the ripe flavor which 
no new pipe possesses. A pipe, like wine 
and violins, must have age, and, within cer- 
tain limits, it improves with use. 

The Lonely Man's teeth settle comfortably 
into the familiar indentations ; his fingers 
stray in loving dalliance over the warming 
bowl ; his lips caress the smooth amber of 
the stem ; and he finds no small degree of 
satisfaction in these accessories of the act 
of smoking, which appeal only to the sight 
and touch. He likes best to smoke a pipe 
that has a simple, pleasing appearance, in 
harmony with the quieting influence of the 
tobacco's fragrance. 

The pleasure of smoking is largely a 
matter of imagination. Of all the physical 
pleasures, it seems to be the most delicate, 
refined, and intellectual. It appeals to all 
the senses. The eye is gratified by the 
wreaths and columns and spirals of smoke as 
7 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

they gracefully float in ever-changing forms 
upwards toward the ceiling, and trace their 
delicate and evanescent frescoes on the walls. 
This is a beauty of figure, color, and motion. 
In the outlines there is nothing that could 
offend the most aesthetic taste, and there is 
an indefiniteness that allows the imagination 
free play to see in the fleeting traceries what 
images it will. There are no glaring colors 
here to offend the artist's eye ; there are no 
clumsy movements to disturb the dreamer's 
soul. It has all the charm of the impalpable, 
the impermanent, and the indefinite. 

The smooth feel of the hard round bowl 
and the polished stem gratifies the fingers and 
the lips, where the sense of touch is most 
acute. There is an elusive element in this 
feel, that cannot be defined. Such is the 
poverty of the vocabulary of touch that we 
can only say, " The pipe feels good " ; but 
there are many ways of pleasing the sense 
of touch, and this is one way that does not 
bring disquiet in its wake. 
8 



PRELIMINARY MUSINGS 



Taste and smell find in the soothing fra- 
grance of the smoke their most subtle delight 
and exquisite satisfaction. This is the rich 
reward to which the faithful eating of a din- 
ner justly leads. It would be a dismal world 
if there were no cooks in it, for it has been 
said that civilized man cannot live without 
cooks ; but after the coarse, material busi- 
ness of eating, the pleasure of smoking seems 
almost refined enough to be called spiritual. 

He who is addicted to the pleasures of the 
table takes the solid food into his mouth, 
chews it, and swallows it ; the smoker merely 
draws the imponderable spirit of the fragrant 
leaf into his mouth, where it implants its 
subtle kiss and works its gentle sorcery, and 
is then exhaled in graceful clouds in whose 
interweaving lines and curves he sees the 
peaceful rural scenes of earlier days — the 
winding brook, the distant field of waving 
grain, the glinting rays of the setting sun, 
the faces of loved ones whose features he will 
never see again except in some spirit world, 
9 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

be it the world of these dissolving clouds 
or some other spirit world we know not of. 

Some unfriendly critic of the habit of smok- 
ing has said that a pig is not so depraved as 
a man who smokes, for a pig will not smoke. 
It is true that pigs do not smoke ; at least, 
not many of them do. Unfortunately there 
are some pigs that do smoke, but this is not 
the cause of their swinishness ; it must be 
something else. The smoker's pleasure is 
procured through the agency of fire, the type 
and emblem of all purity. The product of 
the fire is smoke ; the residue is ashes. 
These things and their enjoyment are as far 
removed from thoughts of sv/ine as filth from 
purity. 

To smoke, and see the children of one's 
fancy in the fleecy figures of the smoke, and 
let one's weary mind feed on the past, from 
which the gentle offices of time have plucked 
the stings, while memory paints the joys in 
brighter colors than they ever had before, is 
man's high privilege. 

ID 



PRELIMINARY MUSINGS 



So thinks the Lonely Man, as the storm 
howls on ; and if we do not think exactly as 
he does, many of us act as if we did, and we 
ought therefore to alter either our habits or 
our views. 

It may be (reflects the Lonely Man) that 
smoking has its penalties. So have all the 
other pleasures and enjoyments of this life. 
The pleasures of this life are like some lus- 
cious fruit that hangs on thorny trees beside 
our pathway through the world. The thorns 
inflict the penalties we pay for pleasure. If 
we pluck the fruit, the thorns will prick us 
now and then ; but if, like cowards, we en- 
deavor to avoid these thorns by shrinking to 
the pathway's other side, we not only miss 
the fruit, but fall into those spiky brambles 
whose barren branches bear no fruit. 

The thorns that guard the pleasures of this 

life are not the only thorns along our path ; 

and if we must in any case be stung, let 

us rather risk the penalties of moderate en- 

II 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

joyment than those pains whose sharpness 
is not mitigated by reward of any kind. 
Though virtue is its own reward, the avoid- 
ance of a reasonable pleasure through fear 
of penalties is not a virtue. The fear of 
penalty is the skulking worm that creeps into 
the apple's core, and spoils its flavor if we 
pluck and eat it, or scares us into other thorns 
as sharp as those that guard the fruit if we do 
not. If we choose wisely and then pluck 
with care, we may avoid the points of many 
thorns that really exist; and if we banish 
fear, the dim and distant outlines of many 
penalties will prove to be illusions. 

The only certain safety in this world is in 
the grave. There we may be as safe as none 
but dead men can be. No evil agency 
can harm the dead ; the living are in con- 
stant danger. But it is a foolish soldier 
who shoots himself to escape the dangers 
of the battlefield; and he has as dull a soul 
who is too prudent to be happy now and 
then. 

12 



PRELIMINARY MUSINGS 



For my part, I prefer to take a middle 
course, avoiding certain penalties that are the 
price of pleasures not worth so sure a pain ; 
and when I cannot choose my course, but 
must perforce be stung, I try to fix my 
thoughts upon the beauty of the thorn and 
learn something from the sting. 

For example, this present loneliness of 
mine has serious drawbacks, but I am not 
certain that it is not a blessing in disguise. 
If it is, the blessing is as well disguised as 
are the advantages of poverty ; but in any 
case it is my present lot, and if it has advan- 
tages, I shall soon learn what they are. 

It is no fault of mine that, during my long 
absence, my old friends have been scattered 
to the four corners of the upper and the 
nether world. It is through no fault of mine 
that these pleasant-looking strangers who 
now surround me do not suspect that my 
companionship might be amusing. I cannot 
tell them ; and they may not be so pleasant 
as they look. The few of them that I do 
13 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

know do not seem like the friends of former 
times. 

I wonder if these old friends themselves 
would seem the same. May not old Father 
Time have played strange antics with their 
faces and their natures ? When friends are 
parted by the accidents of life, and separation 
lasts till they become accustomed to it, it 
may be better for the permanence of their 
affection that they never meet again. Their 
friendship has become a finished product : it 
crystallizes like the language of a dead race, 
and so becomes a stable, changeless entity. 
If this gem of friendship be again dissolved, 
it may never crystallize again, and if it does, 
it certainly will take a different form. 

The friend that lives among my dearest 
recollections of the past is one that I shall 
ever love. He has the same share of affec- 
tion that he ever had. I count the fact that 
we have known and loved each other one of 
the imperishable rewards of life. 
14 



PRELIMINARY MUSINGS 



The friend I meet when ten long years have 
rolled away is not the friend I used to know 
and left. He tries to gather up the scattered 
fibres of the bond that once united us. I try 
to do the same. We try to guide the long 
deflected currents of our lives back into the 
channels in which they used to flow. 

The effort is a futile one. New channels 
have been worn, and worn so deep that we 
shall hardly make the currents leave them; 
and if we do, they find their old beds full of 
the debris of crumbling banks and growing 
vegetation. The distinct path along which 
they once took their easy course is filled with 
obstacles and in some places quite obliter- 
ated ; and so the struggling current either 
hurries back between the banks that give it 
easy passage, or, in its effort to seek out the 
old obstructed path, it wears another and a 
different channel in the face of Nature. A 
friendship may be formed, but it will not be 
the old one. 



IS 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

The effort to restore an interrupted friend- 
ship is like the effort that a writer makes to 
find the happy thought he had a week ago. 
He calls before his consciousness the gen- 
eral import of the thought. Here is one of 
the very words he used in giving utterance 
to it ; there is another one ; and, struggling 
through the general miscellany of more re- 
cent thoughts, a few more words come slowly 
creeping to his mind. He takes his pen and 
tries to write the thing on paper, — which 
has a better memory than brains, — but what 
he writes is not the thought he had before. 
The substance is recovered, but the snap and 
sparkle of the thing are gone, and he cannot, 
by any effort of his will, compel the nebulous 
substance of the thought, which still is his, 
to take the definite and perfect form it had 
before. 

The past is past for ever, and therein lies 
the safety of its treasures. If they are per- 
fect they ever shall remain so, and we may 
love them as we will ; but when we try to 
i6 



PRELIMINARY MUSINGS 



duplicate them from the materials of the 
present, we shall be fortunate if we do not 
obtain results that are grotesque. 

To feast upon the treasures of this past is 
one of the rewards of loneliness. This is 
a rare delight that flees from those who spend 
their lives in hurrying crowds. 



17 




II 

THE VANTAGE GROUND OF 
LONELINESS 

THERE is another and a greater gain in 
loneliness, reflects the Lonely Man. It 
is the gain that comes from thinking one's 
own thoughts and knowing that they are 
one's own and not the mere participation 
of an automatic mind in the unreasoned 
thinking of a mob. How many thoughts are 
uttered that are not the mere reverberations of 
the general voice ? The thought-wave of the 
crowd strikes on the puny little brain of one 
man in the crowd, and he crys out, " Aye, 
aye ! 't is so ! " and thinks the thought his 
own. He passes on the thought with neither 
i8 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

more nor less of content in it than it had 
before, and thus the ever-widening circle of 
this mental agitation extends till it embraces 
the entire crowd and blends it into one un- 
reasoning whole. The individual minds are 
blotted out. They flow together like the 
drops that go to form the ocean, and have no 
longer power to do the bidding of their wills, 
but yield to every undulation of the undiffer- 
entiated whole. 

Unlike a wave of water, sound, or light, 
which loses amplitude with every increase of 
the distance from its starting point, the thought- 
wave in a crowd gathers in volume with its 
progress, and each reflection of the mental 
undulation seems to strengthen it. A whisper 
sets a mob in motion ; the whispering quickly 
grows to murmuring ; the murmuring grows 
to yells ; and when the yells come back to 
him who uttered the first whisper, he yells 
himself, not knowing that he has but hyp- 
notized the mob, and that his own reflected 
hypnotism has hypnotized himself. 
19 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

There is something of the mob in every 
assemblage : it has not many minds, but one 
— if we may call that mind whose thinking is 
as reasonless and reflex as the vagaries of a 
dream. 

What is the nature of a dream ? 

If the sleeper's head is high, he thinks he 
is being hanged ; if it is low, he is falling 
down a well. The heavy food he ate last 
night makes an impression on the endings of 
his pneumogastric nerve, which carries this 
impression to the medulla oblongata^ — the little 
piece of marrow that is the seat of all the vital 
centres of vegetative life. From here the 
spreading fibres of the crura cerebri conduct 
the food's impression to those gray cells in 
the brain where simple consciousness resides. 
It goes no higher. The citadel of Reason, 
wherein the godlike mistress of all sane think- 
ing sits, has closed its doors and drawn the 
bridges from across the moat. The veiled 
enchantress. Reason, is asleep; and while 
she sleeps, the disconnected and ungoverned 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

points of consciousness within the brain, 
being roused to action by the food's impres- 
sion, respond by being conscious in the only 
way for which their structure fits them. 

Their different structures fit them to be 
conscious in different ways. One group of 
cells can see, but cannot hear nor smell nor 
feel ; and if the impulse started by a sound 
or smell or touch can reach this group, the 
consciousness of sight — not touch nor smell 
nor sound — is the result. One group can 
hear, but cannot see nor feel ; another feels, 
and others taste or smell. 

If the slumber is not deep, these different 
groups may be united into a larger group, in 
which a little thinking, like the thinking of a 
printing-press, is done. It simply utters to 
itself the thing to which the structure of 
its type compels it to give utterance. The 
movements of a jumping-jack could not be 
more automatic. Its structure makes it only 
fit to kick or turn a somersault, and when its 
string is pulled, no matter how, the jumping- 

21 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

jack responds in the only way in which it 
can respond — it kicks or turns a somersault. 
Thus physical disturbances give rise to gro- 
tesque fancies, which the dreaming mind 
believes and the dreamer sometimes acts 
upon. 

If the sleeping goddess, Reason, were 
awake, she would at once perceive the ground- 
lessness of all these various perceptions and 
conclusions. She would at once distinguish 
that of which she simply recollects or re- 
combines a past impression from that by 
which she is surrounded. Her sovereign 
sway would relegate these flimsy fragments 
of the shadow world back to their proper 
sphere. She alone would be the guide of 
choice and action : her regal voice would fix 
the limits and conditions of belief. No con- 
scious nor half-conscious act would be per- 
mitted whose motive did not first appeal to 
her and get her sanction. No credence 
would be given to groundless fancies that 
have no passport to the sacred chamber of 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

belief, and the agitation of a group of partly- 
disconnected brain cells would not be counted 
such a passport. 

But now, while Reason sleeps, the most 
absurd and idiotic fancies are believed. Both 
judgment and volition have become the sport 
and plaything of every chance impression : 
an elephant has feathers ; a crocodile has 
wings ; a man falls in a pit that is ten feet 
deep, and never strikes the bottom. He 
dreams he slays his dearest child, and dreams 
that he does right j or he is dead and knows 
he is, and still attends to his affairs on earth. 
Or, if the field of action is invaded, the 
dreamer leaves his bed and does things that 
he neither would nor could do if awake : he 
climbs down fire escapes or lightning rods, 
and thinks he is dancing on a level floor. 

Such is the nature of a dream. Such is 

the nature of all thought and action when 

Reason does not sit upon her throne and 

wield her royal sceptre, and seldom does she 

23 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

sit secure upon her throne in the environ- 
ment of a crowd. The presence of the 
crowd distracts and interrupts the inner cur- 
rents of the soul by which Queen Reason 
holds communication with the lower mind. 
The currents seem to leave their protoplasmic 
wires within the brain, and, through the 
medium of sympathy, to leap through space 
to other brains when other brains come near. 

The all-pervading medium of the mental 
universe is sympathy ; and as the undula- 
tions of material ether transmit such forms 
of energy as heat and light and magnetism to 
every particle and planet in the world of 
space, so sympathy transmits these subtler 
forces of the soul from one soul to another, 
with an increase of intensity as their prox- 
imity increases. So fear or anger, courage, 
merriment, or hope, will leap through sym- 
pathy across an intervening space and cause 
a like emotion in another mind. 

If this drawing off of currents makes a 
break in the connection between the higher 
24 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

and the lower elements of mind, Queen 
Reason sleeps again, for she cannot keep 
awake without the stimulus of action ; and, 
without the personality which Reason gives, 
the mental forces, melting into those of all 
the other minds about them, may be moulded 
by suggestion as a potter moulds a mass of 
clay. He of the crowd asks not, " What 
does Reason say ? " but, " What says the 
crowd ? " 

There may be strong men in the crowd 
who are not of it. There may be others not 
so strong, who, while they feel the substance 
of their minds and wills dissolving in the 
mental tides that ebb and flow about them, 
still do a little thinking for themselves. The 
rest have undergone complete solution in the 
waters of those tides, and have no more voli- 
tion of their own than a patent music-box 
that plays whatever piece one puts between 
its rollers. They undulate to every wind of 
doctrine that blows upon them and move in 
25 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

dull obedience before the one that blows upon 
them hardest. What they believe is what 
the crowd believes; what they approve is 
what the crowd approves. And if to-morrow 
the general conscience and belief shall change, 
theirs will change with them, and not because 
a ground for change is found, but for the 
sole reason that one drop of water in the 
ocean can hold no more nor less of salt than 
its next neighbors. 

The crowd they follow may be either great 
or small ; its sway may reach back into the 
remotest past, or be a thing of yesterday ; 
it may be like a little lake whose slender 
streams keep it but faintly in communica- 
tion with the sea, or like a mighty ocean, 
embodying in its substance the most of 
all the liquid minds that are or have been 
or shall be. 

In any case such persons' minds are liquid, 
and their bodies do the bidding of their form- 
less minds. They ever bend their suppliant 
knees before their shrine of fashion, be it the 
26 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

fashion of apparel or that of belief. They 
wear the clothes she dictates, without regard 
to comfort, beauty, health, or common sense. 
They blindly follow where she leads in 
politics and religion. They wear the face of 
Europe out in waging vain crusades against 
the Turks, and blot the history of the world 
by burning heretics and witches. 

They learn at school that three times one 
are three, and straightway go to church and 
learn that three times one are one. They 
are as confident that they are right in one 
place as in the other. In neither case do 
they believe because they hear the voice of 
Reason telling them that that which they be- 
lieve is true. In their minds Reason sleeps ; 
her sacred voice is dumb ; and what is left 
of mental life in them is no more worthy to 
be called a mind than is the mechanism of 
a phonograph, which speaks back anything 
that one speaks into it, provided it is spoken 
loud enough. 



27 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

If they are scientific, their science will 
most certainly conform to the formulae pre- 
scribed by that particular scientific crowd to 
which they happen to belong. If some rash 
member of the crowd brings forward some 
new truth which contradicts some old ac- 
cepted theory, they ridicule his reasoning and 
treat him with contempt and scorn, — unless 
he is a leader of the crowd whom it is the 
fashion to believe. In that case, the very 
walls are damaged by their tumultuous ap- 
plause. They wear out their eyes and mi- 
croscopes in hunting further proof of what 
the great man says ; and, no matter what 
they find, not until the current of belief 
within their crowd begins to ebb will the 
firmness of their own conviction weaken. 

In the field of politics their side is always 
wholly right, and the other wholly wrong, 
whether the issue be a tariff, stamp act, pro- 
hibition, or a war with Spain. No matter 
how their leaders blunder, or the country 
28 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

flourishes or suffers, no matter how their 
promises are kept or broken, their side is 
always right and the other side is wrong. 

If some great or small upheaval in the 
swamp of politics should make them occupy 
the ground their foes have lately held, and 
send the other party to the ooze and slime 
which they themselves have just forsaken, the 
doctrines which they fought before they now 
defend, and they execrate their own aban- 
doned policies. For this change of heart 
their ever-ready tongues will find pretexts, and 
their heads will think them reasons. That 
the cause of their conversion is the presence in 
this new part of the swamp of their own par- 
ticular crowd or dominating leader, they never 
once suspect. They may deny that they 
have undergone a change, so easily do they 
assume new forms. The shimmering sur- 
face of their minds will now reflect as true 
an image of the cat-tails waving over them 
as were the images of those dragon-flies that 
were embodied in their old belief. 
29 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

The literature they read must bear the 
impress of that literary fashion which has 
dominion in their crowd. The books and 
magazines they read are praised and gloated 
over, not because their contents merit it, but 
because the author's or the publisher's name 
upon the title-page is a literary fetich in their 
crowd and has the magic power of making 
wheat and chafF of equal worth. They 
blindly think their favorite authors cannot 
make mistakes with reference to either liter- 
ary art or facts, — oblivious of the axiom 
that no living man is perfect, and that 
nothing ever was or can be proved by being 
printed in a book. 

What fallacy that ever yet has been con- 
ceived within the human mind and come to 
term has not been born on paper ? If be- 
ing printed could make an assertion true, I 
would print the consummation of my dearest 
hopes and thus transmute the shadowy ma- 
terial of hope into the solid substance of 
reality. I would write the opposite of many 
30 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

things which now are true, and make them 
untrue; for the slavish ink would shape 
itself into a falsehood with no more trouble 
than it takes to tell the truth. 

A truth must find its proof in reason or 
experience and not in ink, which can do 
nothing but present it to these tests. If 
these tests prove it true, it is true ; if they 
do not, there is not ink enough in all 
the sea of books which groaning printing- 
presses vomit forth to prove one word of 
any truth. 

The slaves who follow crowds mistake the 
medium of truth for truth itself. To them 
the printed statement of a fact is the fact, 
especially if they find it in some book which 
has the approbation of their crowd. Then, 
not only do they pin their faith and fix the 
seal of their approval to the book, but their 
interpretation of its contents is the one that 
has the sanction of the crowd. If in some 
lofty moral lesson wrought into the texture 
of a fable the crowd sees nothing but a 
31 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

literal narrative of facts, they will see nothing 
in the story but authentic history, and the 
winds of prejudice which they let loose lash 
up the watery substance of their minds into 
furious waves whose thunders drown the 
voice of him who sees the truth. If, on 
the other hand, a love-song seething with the 
passions of hot-blooded youth is held to be 
a prophecy, they see in each particular sen- 
tence a prophetic meaning which the author 
never put there, and they completely miss 
the beauty of the song. If in the crude 
attempts of primitive, half-savage man to find 
an explanation of the universe, the crowd 
finds reason to believe that Nature's laws are 
temporal and mutable, they blindly do the 
same and strive to close not only their own 
eyes, but those of all mankind. Thus, they 
miss the lesson which the ancient writers 
teach, that man's solution of Nature's bound- 
less mystery must be gradual, and that every 
honest effort in this line contains some grains 
of truth which may give it lasting fame. 
32 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

If their crowd is one that makes a specialty 
of scoffing at the writings which some other 
crowd holds dear, they will sneer and scoff be- 
cause their crowd does, and not because they 
ever had opinions of their own. An applauded 
shaft of sarcasm which they hear their leaders 
utter has the force of an obsession in their 
minds, — not because the situation warrants 
it (and sometimes it does), but because they 
know it takes the fancy of their crowd. 

The book that lives because its gleaming 
rays of truth send swift conviction into minds 
that have not yet dissolved within the crowd 
(and, when Reason momentarily awakes, into 
those minds that have), lives by the same 
concurrence of opinion that gives unworthy 
fame to books that have but hypnotized the 
crowd. Who knows, then, whether any 
book that rides high on the wave of popu- 
larity is held aloft by virtue of its own eter- 
nal worth or by the force of fashion ? One 
may decide by reading it whether it deserves 
the place it has ; but, even though the book 
3 33 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY Mx\N 

be worthy of its fame, can one know that it 
is this that keeps its name and its author's 
name alive ? How long must fame outlive 
its dead possessor to prove that it depends 
upon a true perception of the dead man's 
work ? 

Those who compose the automatic and 
composite crowd-mind are as completely 
under the dominion of suggestion in their 
acts and feelings as they are in their beliefs. 
Their aims in life and their methods of 
achieving them are the aims and methods of 
the crowd. In the shaping of these ends 
and means Reason has no voice. If their 
crowd bows at the shrine of Mammon, so do 
they ; if it worships Mars, they bend the 
knee to him ; and they know as little why 
they worship one god as the other. 

Thrift that impels men to provide for 
future needs is reasonable, and the just pro- 
tection of one's honor, liberty, or life may 
necessitate recourse to arms ; but it is not 
34 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

thrift that gives to gold its devilish charm, 
nor justice that makes war the hellish game 
it is. It is the inertia of a somnambulistic 
crowd. 

Swayed by the suggestion that the mere 
possession of unnecessary wealth confers 
more honor than any virtue could confer, the 
dancing puppets of the crowd scramble after 
money which they do not need and never 
can need, — often at the cost of all their 
honor, all their virtues, all their finer feelings, 
and all their decent human traits, — just to 
get the plaudits and the envy of other dancing 
puppets like themselves. 

When the dreamer wakes, he cannot tell 
why he left his bed and found the most un- 
speakably intense delight in heaping up a 
pile of trash. Nor do the dreaming puppets 
of the crowd know that the keen delight 
they find in amassing needless wealth is not 
based on reason, but springs from the tyranny 
of a fierce suggestion dominating a somnam- 
bulistic crowd. 

35 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

The joy they find in needless wealth would 
quickly vanish if their crowd should disinte- 
grate and its individual members so awake. 
What pleasure would their vast possessions 
give them if they should be banished from 
their crowd, and their liquid minds should 
melt in the waters of some other crowd in 
which no drop of mental liquid but their own 
would find pleasure in unnecessary wealth ? 

But now, while the teeming millions of 
their fellow drops find their most ecstatic 
joy in the ownership of wealth, so do they. 
Though their fellows have no gold and curse 
the man who has, yet they feel the deadly 
charm of its baleful glitter, and — although they 
do not know it — what they feel is instantly 
imparted to the waters of the crowd about 
them, and helps to swell the heaving billows 
of its greed. One liquid mind thus acts and 
reacts on the liquid minds about it in awak- 
ening and maintaining greed for gold, as it 
does in transmitting and reflecting waves of 
murderous fury in a mob. 

36 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

It cannot be denied that it requires ability 
to create a princely fortune, and there is 
some reason in the admiration of ability of 
any kind ; but it does not follow that it is 
as reasonable to admire that which ability 
achieves. It requires some skill and courage 
to cut a good man's throat ; and a successful 
counterfeiter can lay claim to some ability. 
But the crowd that follows Mammon pays 
homage not so much to skill and courage as 
to gold. If a man has that in plenty, no one 
cares in Mammon's crowd how much or 
little sense he has. 

Really great men in that crowd are seldom 
great enough to feel that there is no special 
honor in a rich man's smile. Men of smaller 
calibre, who still have sense, count it gain to 
violate what sense they have to get the rich 
man's notice. The rest are so completely 
hypnotized by wealth that they see no other 
good or great thing in this world or any future 
world. Even though they hate the owner, 
they betray by their very hatred how they 
37 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

envy him and would like to own his wealth. 
If they can, they imitate him, and if they 
can't, they often try to do so. If he has 
some crazy fad, they endeavor to affect it 
also. If he is illiterate, they do not care for 
learning. If he is immoral, their own morals 
may be lax. Doing what he does, they feel 
in some small measure the honor and the 
greatness which they think belong to wealth. 
They read in glaring headlines all the petty 
details of the rich man's daily life, and thus 
furnish all the reason editors have for print- 
ing such unprofitable trash. They join the 
rich man's club, and they attend the church 
of which he is a member. They build their 
houses on the rich man's street and as near 
his house as they can. 

Rich men are not all fools, nor are all poor 
men slaves to Mammon ; but those who are, 
and whose prayers to Mammon have not yet 
been answered, would give ten years of life 
to have any fool who is rich thrust his feet 
beneath their tables and eat their food. 

38 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

Their doors will quickly swing upon their 
hinges to the magic touch of gold, and no 
questions will be asked as to how the gold 
was won. Their daughters' hearts, though 
cold as marble to the pleading voice of love, 
will melt like snow in summer in a crucible 
of gold. 

Thus, however much they hate the man, 
by every word and action they glorify his 
wealth. By their envy and their fawning 
and their aping of rich men, and their base 
idolatry of wealth, the puppets of the crowd 
who have no wealth exhibit as complete a 
subjugation to automatic greed as that which 
dominates the greediest millionaire. Their 
fluid minds impart emotions as readily as they 
absorb them, and thus intensify the force of 
that false suggestion which gives to needless 
wealth the only charm it has. So the insane 
greed for gold dissolves and grows within the 
general crowd, while the gold itself collects 
within the coffers of a few. 



39 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

If the crowd is one of fighters, those who 
compose it are dominated by the love of 
war. They see no glory and no honor save 
that achieved in battle, and they see this just 
because it is suggested to them. Nature may 
have given them human hearts, but the plau- 
dits of their crowd will make them glad to 
welter in a human shambles. Their greatest 
heroes are the men whose hands have shed 
the greatest quantity of human blood. Their 
interests are the interests of war. The cause 
for which they fight may be either just or 
unjust, but the delight they find in slaughter 
is not the pleasure that arises from satisfying 
justice; it rests upon the lust for carnage 
awakened by some breath of hell blowing on 
an automatic crowd. 

The walking dreamer cannot tell, when he 
awakes, why it gave him pleasure when 
asleep to cut his brother's throat ; nor does 
the war crowd know that the hideous joy it 
finds in wholesale murder is the suggested 
pleasure of a crowd that has been hypno- 
40 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

tized. Poor human nature, however bad it 
is, would never do the ghastly things that 
have been done on myriad battlefields, if 
their doing were dependent on the approval 
of Reason. 

But there is no other form of hypnotism 
that sweeps so surely and so swiftly through 
the most enormous crowds as that which is 
induced by the bugle blast of war. There is 
no other crowd that is so completely auto- 
matic as the crowd whose serried ranks com- 
prise the means and food of war. The 
commands of officers are unconsciously 
obeyed. The men and the very horses of 
the crowd are mere levers and escapements, 
wheels and springs of some machine. In the 
tumult of the fight, the movements of the 
vast machine may seem less regular and uni- 
form, but they are no less automatic than the 
movements of a marching army. And, as 
some monster engine whose wheels have left 
the tracks will plunge in mindless madness 
to its own complete destruction, crushing into 
41 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

flying splinters every obstacle in its way, so 
when some accident of war starts a panic in 
the war machine, there is no means of stay- 
ing it till its fury has been spent. 

Hope and fear and hate and thirst for hu- 
man blood are as dependent on suggestion in 
this huge machine as are the movements of a 
marching or a fighting army or the pandemo- 
nium of a disorderly retreat. 

But the actual war machine is not the 
whole war crowd, and all the fluid minds 
within the crowd are dominated by the same 
suggestion that controls the soldier in the 
field. Ranting politicians who start the first 
war cry, demagogues whose duties to their 
families keep them at their own firesides, 
silly girls whose heads are turned by the 
splendor of their lovers' uniforms, kings and 
princes whose dominions are not wide enough, 
and all the hosts of others who see glory in 
the murder of a fellow-man for murder's 
sake, are members of the dreaming crowd, 
whose fluid minds have melted in its waves. 
42 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

They get their feelings from the fluid minds 
about them and impart their dreaming frenzy 
to their neighbors. Thus the whole crowd 
is a huge automaton, with no will or reason 
of its own. 

In their amusements, the followers of 
crowds get their inspiration not from Reason, 
but from the crowd. If the latter finds its 
chief delight in straddling a two-wheeled 
machine, and riding like the wind to no 
place, for no reason, — so do they. The 
usefulness of the machine and the pleasure 
which its reasonable use affords are not the 
reasons for their riding it. They do it — 
though they do not know it — because it is 
the fashion of the crowd. Their minds, at 
this particular point, have melted in the 
waters of the crowd, which diffuse some 
specially soluble ingredients with greater 
swiftness than some others. The frenzy 
quickly spreads, like an epidemic of la grippe^ 
till the very roads and sidewalks are ob- 
43 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

structed with flying wheels. Little boys and 
girls, young men and women, aged men with 
flying beards and spindling shanks, ponderous 
dames with quivering outlines, blushing spin- 
sters and other females grown too bold to 
blush, — crouch like monkeys in the saddle, 
while their reeking bodies pump and pedal, 
jolt and jostle, over stony roads to proclaim 
their own subjection to the craze. 

If the crowd is one that travels, your 
crowd-man travels with the best of them, 
not for the benefit that sane minds get from 
travel, but because of his subjection to the 
fashion of the crowd. He strokes his pointed 
beard in Paris and ogles shop-girls in Berlin, 
and swells with silly pride to think how like 
he is to the travelled members of his crowd 
whose ape and mirror he aspires to be. He 
travels endless weary miles in wretched rail- 
road coaches to see some landscape that may 
not equal those he never saw at home. He 
grows eloquent over any pond in Europe, as 
44 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

if there were no lakes at home. He lets a 
red-nosed guide fill his memory with fables 
about any crumbling pile of stones and mortar 
that some other fool has paid to see. He 
does it all because it is the fashion of his 
crowd, and does not stop to notice that he 
has been hypnotized. If Reason were awake, 
he certainly would not do all the things he 
does, or, at least, would do them differently. 

If his crowd is superstitious, so is he. He 
will lie awake at night and tremble while he 
listens for the footsteps of a ghost that some 
other members of his crowd have heard. If 
he hears them, or thinks he does (which is 
the same), he will pay a priest to exorcise the 
house. He will let the broken fragments of 
a mirror outweigh the reassuring voice of 
science, and make up his mind to die; some- 
times he will succeed, for a false conviction 
may be as depressing to the vital forces as a 
fear which Reason warrants. 



45 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

If some crazy agitation is going forward 
in the neighborhood, and some new prophet 
or Messiah is being proclaimed, the crowd- 
man is the one who is most apt to go to 
scofF and then remain to pray. His fluid 
mind is so devoid of personaHty that it in- 
stantly assumes the form and nature of the 
minds within the crowd it happens to be in 
at a particular time. 

Thus do all weak minds — and in a less 
degree all stronger ones — reveal their solu- 
bility in all the oceans, lakes, and pools in 
which the minds of men collect. 

To think one's own thoughts and to know 
they are one's own, and not the thoughts 
which melted minds absorb in mobs ; to feel 
the sane emotions of the human heart, and 
know they are the feelings normal to one's 
self; to let Reason guide one's thoughts and 
feelings and desires, as far as Reason can 
guide human minds — these are the gains of 
loneliness. Strong minds within the crowd 
46 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

may do all this, but such strong minds will 
not be of the crowd, and will be as lonely 
as the mind of him whose sole companion 
is his pipe. 

But is there any mortal mind whose lone- 
liness is complete ? No ; and it is well that 
this is true — well for the crowd and for the 
lonely mind. The world owes much to the 
automatic crowd-mind, for though it seems 
to work as blindly as some huge machine, its 
products, like the products of machines, are 
often either beautiful or useful. It does not 
act within the realm or under the control of 
anything like ordinary human Reason. It 
acts only in obedience to suggestion, but 
only when its working is opposed to Reason 
does it become a thing of terror or of 
ridicule. 

There is a boundless field of thought and 
action in which the crowd-mind is our only 
guide. In this field Reason tells us only 
what is possible and what impossible ; she 
cannot tell us what is real or what is best ; 
47 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

and here, if Reason does not tell us that the 
product of the crowd-mind is absurd, we may- 
accept it. So marvellous an instrument as 
language is a thing which the automatic 
crowd-mind has produced without the aid of 
Reason; and yet this instrument is one which 
Reason uses and must use. Each word in 
any language is a product of suggestion act- 
ing on the automatic crowd-mind. The 
members of the crowd yield to the current 
custom of giving utterance to thought as they 
accept the current feelings and beliefs and 
false ideals of the crowd. In originating and 
perpetuating language Reason has no voice, 
and can have none. There is no reason 
that we can see why any language that ex- 
ists is better than a thousand other possible 
languages would have been if they had been 
adopted soon enough; and yet, these other 
languages do not, and never will, exist. If 
we utter thoughts or even think them, we 
must use the instrument which the crowd- 
mind has given us. 

48 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

Not only in its great utility is language 
wonderful, but in its revelation of the very 
laws of knowledge. In the structure of a 
sentence in any language the same eternal 
laws of logic or of knowledge stand revealed. 
However much the words of one crowd differ 
from those of other crowds, in their outer 
forms and their arrangement in the sentence, 
they group themselves into the self-same parts 
of speech, which represent, in all the differ- 
ent languages, the self-same elements of 
thought and knowledge. To the analytic 
mind a sentence is not merely the expression 
of a truth : it is that which shows the ele- 
ments of which the truth consists. Although 
truth is eternal while fashions change, here 
is a field of truth which has been opened up 
to Reason by the caprice of Fashion. The 
unreasoned freaks and whims of Fashion, in 
the form of signs and words, have caught 
upon the unseen fabric of eternal truth, and 
now the Fashion's form reveals the outlines 
of what could not be seen before. 
4 49 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

So in the realm of beauty must we be 
guided by the minds of crowds. Who 
knows what true beauty is ? In different 
crowds ideals of beauty are incredibly diverse. 
The Zulu chieftain can see beauty where no 
European could, and the European's ideal 
would not appeal to him. Reason cannot 
tell us what is beautiful, and therefore if we 
satisfy that love of beauty which is in every 
soul, we must accept the products of the 
automatic minds of crowds or set up an arbi- 
trary standard of our own without the aid of 
Reason. Who knows but that the fleeting 
standards of the beautiful which Fashion 
changes ere she gives them definite form 
may all contain within their false proportions 
some slight elusive element of beauty which 
is absolute ? Who knows but in some dis- 
tant century the blindly groping, automatic 
general mind of man may seize upon the 
universal form of beauty, and fix its feet on 
an eternal pedestal of truth ? 

Though Reason guides the lonely mind, 
50 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

how limited is her sway ! She guides it 
safely while it keeps within the field of knowl- 
edge ; but how narrow is that field ! How 
little do we absolutely know ! We must be- 
lieve, and act upon beliefs the truth of which 
we cannot absolutely prove. Even here Rea- 
son is our safest guide and helps us, if we 
follow her, to find that which most probably 
is true ; but stretching out beyond the field 
of certain knowledge and reasonable belief, 
is the boundless field of hope and possibiHty. 
Aside from pointing out the line that separates 
the possible from the absurd, Reason gives 
no guidance here. 

Can human hearts ignore this field and 
take no step beyond the point at which they 
must abandon Reason's guidance ? If they 
go at all into this chartless infinite, - — since 
Reason has no power to give us further 
guidance here than to show what may be 
possible and what absurd, — may not the 
guidance of the automatic common mind of 
man be better than no guide at all ? 
51 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

Man's heart rebels at the proffered leader- 
ship of a blind guide — a guide which some- 
times makes of him a thing of ridicule and 
sometimes a hideous monster. Why should 
he have, within the field of mathematics, the 
blazing light of Reason, and in the realm of 
hope toward which the agonizing yearning 
of his heart directs him the uncertain leader- 
ship of a blind automaton ? He would for- 
get the theorems of algebra, and see as clearly 
as he now sees their truth the truth of all 
his dearest hopes. 

How can he know that the hope of crowds 
is not a mere alluring mockery ? The forms 
which hope takes in the different crowds on 
earth are as diverse as are the various com- 
plexions of the crowds. The form of hope 
is a fashion of the crowd, and many fashions 
based on falsehood have reared their haughty 
heads for weary centuries above the prostrate 
form of truth. 

And yet within the realm of hope the 
automatic crowd-mind is man's only guide ; 
52 



VANTAGE GROUND OF LONELINESS 

and though he kneel before what he conceives 
to be the throne of God and pour out im- 
passioned prayers for some assurance that his 
heart's desire is not a tantalizing mockery, the 
echo of the empty air will be his only answer. 

The crowd-mind is man's only guide 
beyond the pale of Reason, but though we 
must admit the blindness of the guide, it may 
be that it is not wholly blind. It may be 
that the fashions which endure the longest 
within the greatest and most widely separated 
crowds contain some fragment of a truth 
entangled in the meshes of their errors to 
give them permanence. It may be that the 
great Eternal — whom some call God, and 
some call Allah, some Brahma, others Nature, 
and still others the Unknowable — is making 
in the various forms which Fashion gives to 
hope in various crowds the only revelation 
of his being which present man could even 
partly understand. 

The automaton that guides us gropes as 
blindly in the field of hope as in any other 
53 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

field ; but if this formless mind of crowds 
has given birth to that which has so true a 
form as language, who knows but that the same 
blind mind, within the realm of hope, may 
guide us to as true a goal ? And as beneath 
the accidental forms of the most different 
languages of different crowds the same eter- 
nal laws of truth can be discerned, who knows 
but that the widely different forms which 
Fashion gives to hope in various crowds con- 
ceal some common and eternal verity ? Who 
knows ? 



54 




Ill 

BOOKS, DOCTORS, IDEALISM, LAN- 
GUAGE, AND GOVERNMENT 

THE Lonely Man's pipe had gone out. 
He knocked out the ashes, refilled 
and relighted his pipe, and again settled him- 
self comfortably in his chair. 

As he smoked, his eyes were for some 
reason arrested by some books on the mantel, 
and his thoughts taking the direction of his 
eyes, — which is somewhat unusual among 
lonely men, — he fell into a bibliological 
reverie which lasted till his pipe had been 
twice refilled and had grown cold after the 
last filling. 

55 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

There were not many books on the man- 
tel; for although the Lonely Man was a lover 
of books, he was not a very heavy owner of 
them, chiefly because he was more willing to 
lend a book than he was to ask for its return. 
Books that would certainly have been on the 
shelves of less critical readers were not in his 
collection, for he was not willing to interrupt 
his reflections to read a book from which he 
could not hope to get something commen- 
surate with the trouble of reading it. He 
had observed that books which really contain 
facts worth knowing are, in these days of 
much printing, extremely likely to be mere 
compilations of better books, and that books 
which are not compilations are apt to achieve 
originality at the cost of veracity and exact- 
ness. He did not like to be led astray by 
the latter ; and, as to the former, he found it 
more interesting to reflect on what his own 
experience had taught him than to read some- 
thing in which one man tries to tell what 
another man knows. 

56 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

If It is as true that a fool learns in the 
school of experience as it is that he can learn 
in no other, the Lonely Man must have pos- 
sessed much knowledge, for, whether he was 
a fool or not, he had had experience of nearly 
everything that a man can read about in 
books, and of some things that a man can- 
not read about — at least in the books that 
are commonly read in good society. 

In fact, as he himself put it, he was a 
fiddle every one of whose strings had been 
played from the key to the end of the finger 
board. He had had nearly every experience 
except that of being put into jail, and he had 
escaped that only through the agility with 
which he once got across a certain frontier. 
From this it is not to be hastily inferred that 
he was in any way deficient on the moral 
side. Even in the case of a man who is in 
jail, innocence is to be presumed till guilt 
is proved ; and from a priori reasoning, it 
seems still more incumbent upon us to pre- 
sume innocence in the case of a man who 
57 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

has never been in jail. Especially is this true 
in a community in which a man can be im- 
prisoned for using profane language to a hotel 
porter — which was the head and front of the 
Lonely Man's offending. 

The Lonely Man's gaze flitted from a vol- 
ume of Shakespeare's plays to a small Bible, 
from this to a text-book of civil government, 
and finally rested on a small medical com- 
pend. Of course, all medical compends are 
small. They are mere abbreviated compila- 
tions of other medical books, but some of 
them are, nevertheless, very useful in the 
hasty reviewing of previously studied subjects. 
They are not so useful in the study of sub- 
jects that have not been previously studied, 
for, while brevity may be the soul of wit, ex- 
tent is a more desirable quality in knowledge. 

This particular compend (mused the Lonely 
Man) is a fine exemplification in medical liter- 
ature of much in little. That is to say, it 
represents, from the author's standpoint, much 

58 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

advertising of himself by means of a little 
book, and from the reader's standpoint, much 
disappointment in an effort to get a little 
information. 

It was written by a hospital Interne or a 
physician in the first year of his practice, for 
the purpose of gaining sufficient prestige to 
enable him to procure a place on the teaching 
corps of a medical college. This fact is not 
mentioned in the preface, but the omission 
of a fact from the preface of a medical com- 
pend in no way impairs the validity of the 
fact. 

The immature author seems to have said : 
" Behold, I also have written a Httle book, in 
which you can find the same facts that you 
could have found in a dozen other books. I 
myself have neither originated nor discovered 
a single one of these facts, or, if I have, it is 
one of no possible consequence, and its dis- 
covery was the result of an earnest endeavor 
on my part to do something that might attract 
attention to myself. 

59 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

" I have no experimental knowledge of the 
truth of any assertion in the book, which I 
hasten to write before the subduing influence 
of practical experience has caused any abate- 
ment of the enthusiasm with which I accept 
the assertions of my masters. The book is 
small, but if I had waited for experience be- 
fore writing it, it might have been still smaller 
than it is, and, in the omitted matter, the facts 
of my own discovery would have been most 
likely to be included. 

" The publication of the book was urgent, 
for there are already several medical com- 
pends where one is needed. If I had waited 
longer, the disproportion between the de- 
mand and the supply might have been still 
greater. 

"Some discrepancies between my book 
and a dozen other equally good books may 
be found, but they could not easily be avoided. 
It must be remembered that it is difficult for 
a dozen different people to tell the same 
truth in a dozen different ways, each of which 
60 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

shall be difFerent enough from the other eleven 
ways to bear the stamp of the author's in- 
dividuality, and yet be perfectly true. This 
has been tried on numerous w^itness stands to 
the discomfiture of the v^^itnesses. I trust, 
however, that the deviation of this book from 
others of its kind will appear to be an ad- 
vantage to the reader, and not a mere ful- 
crum on which to rest the lever of an excuse 
for having written it." 

If any one who has ever written a medi- 
cal compend should happen to overhear my 
thoughts (continued the Lonely Man), I 
should hasten to assure him that I trust his 
compend is one of the few that are really 
needed ; that if it is, its merits and its date 
will speak for themselves; and that I have 
really not been thinking of him or his book, 
but of the book whose author has just spoken 
for himself. 

Of course this author has not actually said 
these things, and I should not like to assert, 
where any one could hear me, that it would 
6i 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

be appropriate for him to say them ; but, 
however inconvenient it may be to be honest 
with one's fellows, there is no risk in being 
honest with one's self. This is a distinction 
which is often overlooked by persons who have 
learned the inexpediency of candor; and con- 
sequently, from practising diplomacy with 
their fellows, they unconsciously fall into the 
habit of practising duplicity with themselves. 
This is both unnecessary and unfortunate, for 
habits of intellectual honesty are not only 
perfectly safe, but highly profitable. 

It is possible that it would be unwise to 
recommend such habits to all persons and 
under all circumstances ; for if one is always 
honest with one's self, one may inadvertently 
be too honest with one's fellows, and it must 
be admitted that absolute honesty, however 
sound it may be at the core, is apt to be a 
little rough and jagged around the edges. 
Politeness and honesty are not always per- 
fectly compatible, and it cannot be suc- 
cessfully denied that politeness is the least 
62 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

objectionable form of insincerity. If my 
friend makes an assertion which I know to 
be false it would seem monstrous to tell him 
that he is either a fool or a liar, though that 
is exactly what honesty would require me to 
do. It would even seem unnecessarily rude 
not to accept the absurd assertion and believe 
it pro tempore myself. 

Now, while these observations do not 
explain any considerable amount of the 
slovenly thinking that is done in the world, 
they explain the necessity of occasional lone- 
liness in the case of those persons who aim 
to be both honest and polite. There is no 
need or possibility of being polite when one 
is absolutely alone. Politeness is a relation, 
and therefore cannot exist where only one 
of the related entities is present, and no vio- 
lence can be done to its principles in an envi- 
ronment of loneliness, by the most rigorous 
honesty of which the human mind is capable. 

For these reasons I find my chief delight 
when, in the evening, I can smoke my faith- 

63 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

ful pipe and think my honest thoughts about 
anything in heaven above, or the earth be- 
neath, or the water under the earth. 

The Lonely Man's eyes still rested on the 
little book at the medical end of the mantel, 
and his thoughts coming back from their 
apologetic excursion along the line of polite- 
ness versus honesty, he resumed his medita- 
tion concerning medical literature. 

A person who writes an unnecessary medi- 
cal compend (he reflected) is not the only 
writer who is amenable to the charge of 
expanding the volume of medical literature 
without increasing its mass or enhancing its 
value. He really does on a small scale what 
some of his elders and exemplars in the medi- 
cal profession do on a larger scale. 

Here the Lonely Man paused in his re- 
flections and almost blushed, for he had 
written some things himself, which, if they 
64 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

were not medical, were, at least probably, 
useless. 

Perhaps complete originality does not 
exist, he reflected. Perhaps we are all, in 
some measure, imitators ; but even if we are, 
and if the products of my poor brain were 
superfluous, the reading of them did not fall 
to the lot of overworked doctors. In any 
case if it is a misdemeanor for an ambitious 
imitator to try to get the undeserved reputa- 
tion of an author, his guilt should be esti- 
mated by the size of his offence. My books 
were very small. 

I am even willing to concede this extenu- 
ating circumstance to the writer of an un- 
necessary medical compend. His book is 
also small, and in it the theme changes so 
rapidly that the reader is not unduly wearied 
by any protracted effort of attention. It is, 
in fact, almost as restful as a dictionary. 

The chief offenders are the writers of some 
of those ponderous tomes which make the 
5 65 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

interior of a medical library look almost as 
discouraging as the interior of a law library, 
and which contain thousands of facts that are 
cozily nestling in the luxuriant verbiage of a 
dozen other books of the same size in the 
same library. 

Now, the world will never be able to repay 
the real discoverers of these facts, nor the 
army of faithful physicians who make use of 
them in their practice. These honest fellows 
evidently believe that the faithful performance 
of duty is its own reward. If it is, they are 
reaping a large harvest of reward ; but if it is 
not, I fear they must collect the bulk of their 
wages in heaven. 

Since these overworked and underpaid 
physicians are the persons who must read 
these enormous medical books, it is hard to 
forgive the writing of a superfluous medical 
treatise ; and my own researches, so far as I 
have had the courage to prosecute them, war- 
rant the conviction that some of these books 
— say about three-fourths of them — are abso- 
66 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

lutely superfluous, always were superfluous, 
and contain nothing of any value whatever 
that could not be found in the other fourth. 

The only excuse for this — but there can 
be none. The only reason for this need- 
less multiplication of medical books is to be 
sought in the fact that medical ethics very 
properly makes it disreputable for a physician 
to seek to attract notice through open adver- 
tising or any other means than that of hon- 
estly trying to help humanity or to advance 
science. Since medical science has been ad- 
vanced by some large books, as well as by 
some small ones, the medical profession is 
generous enough to assume that any medical 
book written in reasonably scientific language 
is the product of another effort in the same 
direction. Thus, the copyist attracts the 
desired notice, and still remains respectable. 
He may even attain a position of eminence 
in the profession, and thus acquire the privi- 
lege of enjoining modesty and unselfishness 
upon the very physicians who must read his 

67 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

own colossal superfluities and actually pay for 
them. 

Whatever apparent cynicism there was in 
the Lonely Man's thoughts had not been in- 
tentional, but had simply resulted from the 
nature of his subject. He was entirely alone, 
and therefore there was no occasion to think 
anything but what seemed to him to be the 
truth. 

Now he seemed to forget the little book 
which had started his thoughts in this direc- 
tion, while he slowly puffed at his pipe and 
watched the blue clouds float silently to the 
ceiling. 

We have not studied doctors as much as 
they deserve to be studied, his thoughts con- 
tinued. When our perceptive faculties are 
pricked or jolted into something like activity 
by the pains of disease or the fear of death, 
we become aware of the doctor's skill, knowl- 
edge, and unselfishness ; but after we have 
been restored to a state of bodily comfort and 
68 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

mental tranquillity, we do not pay much 
attention to him. 

If we had paid more attention to him when 
we were well and in the full possession of our 
faculties, we might have noticed in him some 
interesting traits besides his willingness to 
get out of bed at two o'clock a.m. 

It sometimes seems that the doctor be- 
comes as different from other men in one 
generation as the Jew has become from the 
Irishman since Noah began to bring up a 
family. It is hard to tell how long ago that 
was, for Noah was a considerable sailor, and 
tales about sailors are likely to be tinctured 
with a flavor of romance ; but at all events, 
it was a good while ago, and all the racial 
differences that have grown up among men 
since then are seemingly overshadowed by 
the specific traits which most doctors possess 
in common and have acquired in one gen- 
eration. 

This may be a mere unfounded fancy of 
mine, but I like to beheve it, and I know 

69 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

that the doctor is an interesting animal and 
that one of his most interesting specific 
peculiarities is the quality of his idealism. 

Idealism in philosophy is one thing, in lit- 
erature and art it is another thing, and in 
daily Hfe it is the apex of an ascending series 
the base of which is agnosticism. An agnos- 
tic is a man who believes nothing that he can- 
not absolutely prove; a practical man is one 
who believes anything that he can prove be- 
yond a reasonable doubt ; a hopeful man is 
one who believes anything that he cannot 
disprove ; and an idealist is one who believes 
what he knows is not true. 

The doctor, in the philosophic sense, is 
apt to be an agnostic, but in daily life he is, 
and must be, an idealist ; and his success is 
likely to keep pace with the degree of his 
idealism. This is not strange, for the naked 
facts of disease and death, with which a doc- 
tor has to deal, are not pleasant food for 
thought, and, like other naked things, they 
hardly seem respectable. The patient natu- 
70 



BOOKS, IDEA LISM, GOVERNMENT 

rally wants a physician who can clothe these 
facts with some semblance of cheerfulness 
and respectability ; and in order to do this 
the doctor must fashion the garments out of 
the idealism of his own mind. He thus be- 
comes on one side of his mind an idealist, 
while he is of all men most apt to be an ag- 
nostic on the other side. 

I should not even think about the illus- 
trations of this general truth if I were not 
alone, but loneliness carries with it the sacred 
privilege of thinking about the most horrible 
things in the world without fear of giving 
offence to any one or awakening any unpleas- 
ant thoughts in another mind. 

For example, a man who has cancer of the 
liver and of several other internal organs con- 
sults the doctor because he would naturally 
like to get well. Any one with such a disease 
would like to get rid of it. The disease is 
likely to have progressed so far that its com- 
plete removal would require the dissection of 
the patient, and the careful scraping of several 
71 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

thousand organs that enter into his structure, 
to get rid of stray cancer cells. Even then, 
immersion for a few days in absolute alcohol 
would be necessary to destroy the vitality of 
any remaining cells. 

Of course it is disagreeable to think about 
such things; but I am entirely alone, and 
these are facts, and the doctor knows, on the 
scientific side of his mind, that they are facts; 
but the patient does not want to know it. 
The doctor knows that the patient wants to 
believe that he either does not have a cancer 
at all, or that it has not yet progressed be- 
yond the stage at which it is curable — if 
there is any stage at which a real cancer is 
curable. 

The doctor consequently holds out a 
greater or less degree of hope according to 
the extent of his idealism, and he actually 
believes, on the idealistic side of his mind, 
what he tells the patient. Of course the 
patient dies, but during his illness he has de- 
rived more comfort from the doctor's ideal- 
72 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

ism than from any other source ; and thus 
the doctor comes to carry his idealism into 
the treatment of all incurable as well as all 
curable disorders, to the mutual benefit of 
himself and his clientele. 

The therapeutic value of idealism long ago 
became so apparent that, in the early part of 
the last century, there sprang up in Germany a 
school of doctors whose only resources in the 
treatment of disease were an infinite amount 
of idealism and an infinitesimal amount of 
medicine. They are called homoeopaths. 

The success of homoeopathy encouraged a 
still further reduction in the amount of medi- 
cine and a still further increase of idealism, 
and the result was Chilstian Science with its 
various subdivisions. It exploits a theory 
whereby not only medicine, but all other 
material things — except money — are en- 
tirely eliminated from the treatment of 
disease. 

The Christian Scientists are clever as well 
as cheerful people (mused the Lonely Man), 
73 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

and they have entertained some incurables 
and cured some people who were not sick, 
quite as well as any one else could have done 
it. But when they imagine that they are the 
real discoverers of idealism, or that there is 
anything really original in their philosophy 
or religion or whatever it is, they delude 
themselves. 

Bishop Berkeley, who lived in the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries, was some- 
thing of an idealist himself. He constructed 
a system of philosophy in which he proved 
that there is nothing in the universe but mind 
that can perceive anything, and that there is 
nothing for mind to perceive but ideas and 
illusions. 

According to his philosophy, that which 
we childishly believe to be a world of matter 
is a mere complicated but orderly system of 
illusions. When we think we see a tree, we 
merely have an optical illusion, which is no 
more real than a reflection in a mirror. If 
we touch the tree, we have a tactual illusion, 
74 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

like that of a man who thinks he feels some- 
thing between his toes after his leg has been 
amputated. There is really nothing there at 
all, and when we go away or close our eyes 
the illusion itself vanishes. If any other 
mind incorporated in an illusory body comes 
along to where we thought we saw the tree, 
it will have the same illusion and think it 
sees a tree. The illusion thus keeps pop- 
ping into being whenever any wandering mind 
gets within eyeshot of it, and popping out 
whenever the illusory eye goes away or its 
mendacious vision is shut ofF by getting be- 
hind some other illusion. Thus, so far as 
appearances are concerned, everything goes 
on in this illusory world quite as if every- 
thing were real and permanent. 

The good Bishop meant well enough ; he 
merely wanted to prove the existence of a 
God, and he thought this was the only way 
of doing it. It must be admitted that if he 
had succeeded in proving his premises he 
would have rendered his conclusions ex- 
75 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

tremely probable, for nothing short of omnip- 
otence could attend to so much slide shifting 
without ever showing his magic lantern or 
getting caught with his illusions off the 
canvas when they should have been on. It 
would have been several times easier to 
create a world that would take care of itself, 
and have done with the job. 

But the Bishop proved too much. Or 
rather, he did not prove enough, and David 
Hume came along and proved the rest. He 
took up the argument where Berkeley left it, 
carried it to its logical conclusion, and proved 
that there is no mind in the universe, and no 
universe for a mind to be in, — that there 
is nothing, in fact, but a string of illusory 
ideas which persistently flaunt themselves 
in the face of a consciousness that does not 
exist. 

Now we are beginning to see what ideal- 
ism really is ; but only beginning. If we go 
back — ideally — to ancient Greece, we shall 
make the acquaintance of a gentleman named 
76 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

Pythagoras, who proved without any difficulty 
at all that the universe made itself out of 
numbers. Now, that looks reasonable enough, 
for any schoolboy knows that numbers can 
make a world of trouble, which is exactly 
what this world is. But Pythagoras did not 
have his own way any more than the school- 
boy does, for some of his compatriots proved 
that we do not know anything about numbers 
or anything else — that we absolutely do not 
know anything at all except that we do not 
know anything. Then some other Greek 
finished the whole melancholy business by 
proving that we do not even know that. 

Now, in view of this nihilistic tendency 
of idealism, it seems unreasonable to scold 
agnosticism, as some good people have done, 
for having punctured a few idealistic soap- 
bubbles and cleared the atmosphere. Since 
the agnostic believes nothing that he cannot 
absolutely prove, he would decline to believe 
that a man who does not exist can prove 
that he does not exist, but he would readily 
77 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

admit that a man who does not know any- 
thing can easily prove that. 

We owe a good deal of this wholesome 
agnosticism to doctors, and it is this which 
renders their idealism peculiar, and makes it 
a comparatively safe aid to more material 
agents in the treatment of anything from 
smallpox to malingering. 

Here the Lonely Man paused in his reflec- 
tions, and his attention concentrated itself 
upon a point in the atmosphere just beyond 
the end of his pipe, where he seemed to see 
the last word that had assed through his 
mind. 

Malinger (he reflected) is a beautiful illus- 
tration of the expediency of studying one 
language for the purpose of learning another. 
It is derived from the French word maltngre^ 
which means in French to be sicky and 
in English not to be sick^ while pretending 
to be. 

78 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

One's knowledge of French in this in- 
stance does not seem to help one very much 
in understanding English ; yet there is a 
pretty general impression abroad that one can 
learn what English words mean in English 
only by studying the languages from which 
they were derived. This is why youths of 
both sexes, who are desirous of learning 
English, are encouraged to spend several of 
the most promising years of their lives in 
studying Latin. 

The Latin language was good enough for 
the ancient Romans, but it, like the Roman 
Empire itself, became too old to keep up with 
the march of events. Consequently, after 
having left several hybrid descendants in vari- 
ous European states, being old and full of 
years, it died, and should have been allowed 
to rest in peace. Its corpse was a beautiful 
one, and, without having lost any of its 
beauty, it has become fossilized, and some 
people study it simply on account of its 
beauty. 

79 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

After Latin had died, some priests seemed 
to get a monopoly of all the learning in the 
world, and, as there was very little of it in 
respect to its value, they did not want any of 
it to get away. To preserve it, they kept it 
concealed within the beautiful corpse of the 
dead language. This plan was successful; 
in fact, it was too successful, for it almost 
killed the learning, and did actually cause it 
to remain for several centuries in a state of 
suspended animation. Naturally, any one 
who wanted to get at the learning had to 
become acquainted with the beautiful corpse. 
Consequently, a custom grew up among 
people who wished to be — or be considered 
— learned, of studying Latin; and this cus- 
tom has been continued on one pretext or 
another ever since, although now everything 
worth knowing — not to mention a good 
many things not worth knowing — is printed 
in every respectable language in the world 
except Latin. 

Learning gradually recovered from its cat- 
80 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

aleptic condition and became embodied in 
English and the other hybrid descendants of 
Latin which were not Latin, and which were 
no more like it than an octoroon is like a 
negro. However, the college professor, who 
is a good, honest fellow, and can do several 
things besides teaching Latin, had become so 
accustomed to teaching Latin and its dead 
friend Greek that he feared he could not 
earn his salary — which is small enough, in 
all conscience — without spending three or 
four years almost exclusively in training each 
student to travel via the cemetery to a knowl- 
edge of things which have mostly been con- 
troverted or outgrown. 

Notwithstanding the professor's earnest 
efforts to infuse new life into the fossil re- 
mains of Latin, it gradually became apparent 
that it was so dead that it would have to be 
put in a museum to preserve it, unless some 
other reason than the old one could be found 
for teaching it. The reason was found. In 
fact, several reasons were found. The chief 
6 8i 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

one was that, as the professor had had more 
practice in teaching Latin than in teaching 
anything else, he could best give the student 
the mental gymnastics which is the main 
part of an education by teaching him Latin, 
— which he really does not need to know, — 
and thus give him that degree of mental 
acumen that would enable him, after leaving 
college, to find out for himself the things 
which he does need to know. 

Another reason was that, since English is 
largely derived from Latin, we must study 
the latter in order to understand our mother 
tongue, although we study it by means of 
our mother tongue and neglect the latter 
while doing it. 

It is as if the good professor had said to 
the student : " My dear young man, since 
English is your mother tongue, it is essential 
that you should understand it. Therefore 
you should not study it. You should study 
Latin — a language which died several cen- 
turies before English was born. You must 
82 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

have observed that when one wishes to 
learn one thing, it is always best to study 
some other thing only remotely related to it. 
When one wishes to do one thing, one 
naturally does an entirely different thing. 

" It is true that many of our present Eng- 
hsh words have descended from Latin words, 
but they are, in orthography, pronunciation, 
inflection, and meaning, so entirely different 
from their Latin ancestors that, after you 
have learned the slight resemblances that do 
exist, they will only confuse you and cause 
you to use the English derivatives in their 
Latin sense, and thus obscure your meaning. 
Therefore, you cannot understand English 
till you have mastered Latin. 

" You will receive instruction in Latin 
through the medium of English, and, as 
you do not understand the medium, you will 
naturally understand the instruction. One 
always understands best what is explained 
to one in a language which one does not 
understand. 

83 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

" Latin Is thus a ladder by means of which 
one first climbs to a knowledge of English. 
It is true that English is the ladder by means 
of which one first climbs to a knowledge of 
Latin, but, after one climbs from the Latin 
ladder to the English ladder, one easily per- 
ceives that one was really never on the 
English ladder, and therefore never did any 
climbing, till one had climbed ofF it to 
another ladder and from the latter to the one 
from which one started. 

" As I have already observed, many Eng- 
lish words have descended from Latin words, 
and in their descent to us have become en- 
tirely different from the original Latin words. 
Others have changed very little. Now, since 
we must use the descendants and not the 
ancestors, it might seem most profitable to 
study the present meaning, inflection, pro- 
nunciation, and orthography of these words, 
whether they have changed or not. 

" Nothing could better show your inex- 
perience and unwisdom. The main fact to 
84 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

keep in mind is that these words have de- 
scended, — de^ down ; scandere^ to climb, — 
these words have climbed down from Latin 
ancestors, — ante^ before, cedere^ to go. They 
have climbed down from Latin that goes before. 
Now, that is perfectly plain. They have 
descended from Latin words just as an ele- 
phant has descended from a fish, and it is 
obvious that the only way to understand an 
elephant is to study a fish. When you per- 
ceive that the fish has a tail, whether you 
have ever seen an elephant or not you will 
at once know that it has a tail, and what it 
looks like. The scales of the fish will teach 
you that the elephant does not have scales 
but hair, and very little of that. From the 
bony framework of the fish you will learn 
the exact number, appearance, and uses of the 
bones in the elephant's skeleton. From the 
gills of the fish you will see at once that 
the elephant is an air-breathing quadruped 
and could not live under water. The total 
absence of a nose from the fish's counte- 
8s 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

nance would lead you to expect the ele- 
phant's proboscis. 

"Of course, it might seem to you best to 
learn the main thing first, and then, if any 
time remains, to study the history and evo- 
lution of the thing afterwards. That, how- 
ever, is pure boyishness. You must know 
that, since our precious school days are ex- 
tremely few and brief, we must spend them 
all in learning the non-essentials or we shall 
never have time to learn these non-essentials 
at all. You will unconsciously pick up what 
English you need on the football grounds, at 
the races, and from the newspapers ; and you 
will do it the more readily if you are not 
hampered with any preconceived ideas of 
English grammar. I especially admonish 
you against frittering away your time on so 
trivial a subject as English grammar. If you 
should ever become so unfortunate as to 
possess a knowledge of English grammar, or 
of the exact present meanings of English 
words, you will often hesitate in your speech, 
86 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

through fear of speaking ungrammatically on 
the one hand, or seeming odd on the other. 
It is important that your speech should be 
fluent whether it is grammatical and precise 
or not. 

"Latin orthography is so much like our 
own that, with the unimportant addition of 
w;, we use precisely the same alphabet. It 
is true that we use it very differently ; 
however, while you will not learn to spell 
English words by studying Latin orthog- 
raphy, you can easily conceal your ignorance 
when you go into business after gradua- 
tion by employing a typewriter who never 
went to college, and who will probably 
know how to spell. As to your grammar, 
many of your correspondents will not know 
whether your letters are grammatical or not, 
and if they are ungrammatical, many of 
your other correspondents could not tell 
why. 

" Not only is language an instrument of 
thought, but the study of its structure reveals 

87 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

the structure and composition of thought and 
even of truth. Of course you could learn ail 
this from the study of English, for a thought 
has the same composition in all languages ; 
but if you learn thought-analysis from the 
study of Latin, you will probably think that 
you could not have learned it in any other 
vi^ay, and thus you will experience a pleasing 
sense of superiority. 

" Remember that language is an Instrument 
for expressing thought, and it is always well 
to have numerous instruments for exactly the 
same purpose, — one of them might get 
broken. Then, while you are getting a col- 
lection of instruments for the expression of 
thought, you will not be so increasing the 
quantity of your thought as to put a danger- 
ous strain on any of the instruments. For 
this reason you should study several modern 
languages after learning Latin, for nowa- 
days nobody uses Latin for any other pur- 
pose than that of developing ladder-climbing 
dexterity on the road to English or some 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

other modern language. Nobody pretends to 
speak it. 

"You should study German, French, Ital- 
ian, Spanish, and a few other languages; for 
you may some day go to one of the countries 
in which these languages are spoken, and want 
to order a meal and hear the waiter laugh 
at your French or German or whatever it 
happens to be. You will never learn to 
speak a foreign language like a native, and as 
well as you should be able to speak your 
own, unless you go to the country of that 
language and stay there for life, — and not 
even then unless you are the one example in 
a thousand exceptions. But you may learn 
enough of the foreign language to betray your 
nationality by speaking it, and you will also 
pick up a few phrases which you can con- 
veniently throw into anything you happen to 
write when you do not know exactly what 
you want to say. These phrases will look 
well and will have all the charm of the un- 
known to the majority of your readers." 

89 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

The Lonely Man suddenly paused in his 
reflections and looked round in a startled way, 
for he had begun to think so hard that he 
feared some one might hear him. He knew 
that the knife whose cut is sharpest is the one 
that has the truest edge, and he was too tender- 
hearted to wish to inflict pain on a mosquito. 
He would have been particularly unwilling to 
wound the professor, for he had known a 
good many of him, and had usually found 
him to be a pleasant, polished, well-informed 
man, who, somehow or other, managed to do 
considerable good in the world. He had also 
known several college graduates who had 
plenty of thoughts, and could both speak and 
write them in good English without the aid 
of a typewriter — in spite of having gone to 
college. 

Why should we fear so precious a thing 

as the truth ? he reflected. Philosophers 

have spun out their brains into cobwebs for 

the purpose of finding it. Explorers and in- 

90 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

vestigators have sacrificed their lives for it. 
If we should suddenly become convinced that 
we could never possess it or know it in any 
degree, all hope and possibility of happiness, 
satisfaction, or contentment would instantly 
vanish. Who would want to live or to have 
lived if all thought, all belief, all feeling, all 
existence, is a lie ? Truth is not wholly un- 
attainable. We have actually attained some 
small fragments of it. We pretend to be 
sincere in our search for more. Then why 
do we surround ourselves with bent and 
strangely twisted mirrors which reflect dis- 
torted images of those realities that lie nearest 
to us ? Why do we stand aghast when some 
unbidden hand holds up a glass that simply 
tells the truth ? Would it not be better to 
change the facts that do not suit us than to 
keep the mirrors twisted ? 

Sobered and subdued by these reflections, 
the Lonely Man fell into a dreamy haziness 
of thought, which some people call medita- 
91 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

tion, but which is really nothing but mental 
vacancy of a greater or less degree. At least, 
that is what it is to all appearance. Some- 
thing may be stewing in the impenetrable 
depths of the brain, trying, like the hot water 
at the bottom of a geyser, to get itself together 
and rise to the surface. The Lonely Man 
smoked on with half-closed eyes and let it 
stew. It was no concern of his whether 
it ever reached the surface or not. His 
thoughts were his own if they should ever 
be born ; no one would lose anything if they 
were not. In lonely hours, when one takes 
the hoodwink from one's eyes and Ufts the 
veil from things one hides from others' eyes, 
the thoughts one has belong to him alone if 
there is anything that does. 

His eyes wandered back to the mantel, 
and as he gradually became conscious of 
the treatise on civil government leaning over 
affectionately against the medical compend, 
whatever it was that had been working in his 
mind came through. 

92 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

I have never read that book, he mentally- 
observed. In fact, I own it only because an 
aggressive book-agent once imprisoned me in 
my own house, in the cheerful way that 
book-agents have, and the price of the book 
was the amount of my ransom. There was, 
apparently, not government enough in the 
book to prevent this high-handed robbery in 
broad daylight. I have learned from other 
sources, however, that government is that 
which directs and controls. 

Now, everything must be well directed and 
controlled or it will sooner or later come to 
grief. A billiard ball must be well directed 
and controlled, or the game will be lost, and 
the things that direct and control it are its 
own composition, the end of the cue, the sur- 
face and edges of the table, the balls it strikes, 
and a few other simple little things of that 
sort. 

The living organism known as a human 
being is a trifle more complicated than a 
billiard ball, yet it is directed and controlled 
93 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

with wonderful precision by a government 
which is only more complicated than that 
which governs the billiard ball. 

There are a few billions of cells in the 
body, grouped into various classes, each of 
which devotes itself to an occupation different 
from that of the other classes. Some of these 
cells operate a saliva factory. Of course, no 
one likes to mention the product in polite 
society, but it is, nevertheless, very useful 
and convenient, particularly when one wishes 
to swallow anything. Another group of cells 
operates a pepsin factory. The largest man- 
ufacturing plant in the body produces animal 
starch and bitters. It is called a liver. 

The organism is supplied with air by a 
group of cells which operate a ventilating 
plant. Cells of another group carry the air 
from this plant to the employees in the vari- 
ous factories. 

Arteries do the work of railroads ; nerves 
perform the functions of telegraph and mail 
systems. Nerve ganglia are the sub-stations; 
94 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

and the main postal and telegraph office is, of 
course, the brain. 

Everything is admirably governed in this 
organism. Every cell knows its own busi- 
ness and attends to it. Each is kept in- 
formed of what is going on in the rest of 
the organism, and governs itself accordingly. 
It may receive its information from the 
main office or from a sub-station, but it acts 
according to its information, and does not 
require a policeman to compel it to do its 
duty. If the cells in one kidney become 
disabled, word is sent up to the nearest sub- 
station in the spinal cord, and from there 
it is telegraphed down to the other kidney, 
which magnanimously does the work of 
its unfortunate fellow in addition to its 
own. 

If an army of hostile microbes invade the 
organism, the invaders are attacked by the 
first cells that happen to meet them, and held 
at bay till the regular army arrives. The 
professional soldiers are the leucocytes ; they 
95 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

never desert, and require no officers to direct 
their movements. 

Every citizen is kept in constant com- 
munication with its fellow-citizens by means 
of the admirable telegraph system, and, being 
actuated by a high sense of duty, renders its 
services whenever they are needed, and re- 
ceives its reward without a lawsuit. There 
are plenty of telegraph operators and mail 
clerks, but there are no officers. There are 
no kings or legislatures or courts here, yet 
the government is perfect. Of course there 
is a ruler called mind, but it merely directs 
the whole organism in its relations to the 
outer world, and has very little to do with 
the government of the individual cells ; it 
could not, to any great extent, direct them 
in their relations to each other even if it 
wished to do so. Furthermore, this mind 
itself is nothing but the combined mentality 
of all the individual cells in the body. The 
cells are directed and controlled by their own 
nature and composition on the one hand, and 
96 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

by the conditions which confront them on 
the other. They will rest or work accord- 
ing to existing conditions, and the character 
of their work will depend upon their nature 
and the environment in which they happen 
to find themselves. These are the exact 
factors which govern a billiard ball. 

Now, society is simply a larger organism 
than a man. A social cell is an entire 
human being, and human beings are grouped 
into various classes following different pur- 
suits for the good of the whole organism, 
just as groups of cells perform various ser- 
vices for the good of the individual. 

The social organism, being a more recent 
product of evolution than the individual, is 
far less nearly perfect ; but many people — 
most of them, in fact — are in the habit of 
thinking that it is not an organism at all ; 
that it is a mere artificial aggregation of indi- 
viduals held together like the parts of a clock 
and controlled by a social pendulum in the 
form of an artificial political government. 
7 97 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

Now, it is a spring and not a pendulum 
that operates a clock. The pendulum fur- 
nishes no part of the energy that moves the 
wheels. In fact, it consumes a part of the 
energy supplied by the spring ; and in some 
governments, as well as in some clocks, it 
consumes it all. 

The fact that government, as we ordinarily 
see it, is not a motive power must have been 
appreciated by the gentleman who invented 
the contrivance for regulating the supply of 
steam in an engine. He called it a governor, 
although it supplies no heat or steam or 
energy, and moves no machinery. It is 
simply a dead weight which consumes energy, 
and which is necessary only because the 
steam is too stupid to regulate itself. 

The social organism must have a governor 
or pendulum for the same reason. The 
stupidity which makes political government 
necessary to the social organism is the stu- 
pidity which causes individuals to ignore their 
obligations to each other, and this is the 

98 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 



same stupidity that makes governments bad. 
If we ever become intelligent enough to see 
that it pays to do right simply because it is 
right, and that it does not pay to do wrong 
even though a wrong-doer may escape punish- 
ment, we shall not need much political gov- 
ernment. Until we shall have acquired that 
degree of intelligence, we shall not be able to 
get really good government, and afterwards 
we shall scarcely need it. 

Here the Lonely Man looked cautiously 
round to be quite certain that he was entirely 
alone and that his thoughts were not being 
overheard ; for he was aware that there are 
some honest people who are so intensely 
patriotic that they would regard it treasonable 
to teach men to be decent simply for the love 
of decency, if such a doctrine could possibly 
have the effect of rendering government less 
necessary than it is. He was also aware 
that there is, here and there, a man who 
thinks he has already advanced so far toward 

99 

LcfO. 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

that ideal morality which requires no govern- 
ment for its enforcement that he ofttimes 
feels constrained to go out and blow a few 
thousand fellow-beings into the Styx, just to 
show the tenderness of his regard for the 
rights of others and the excessive superfluity 
of all government for such gentle natures as 
his own. 

Persons of both these classes are highly 
excitable, and about equally dangerous when 
excited. It is always wise — and generally 
impossible — to get them to wait till the end 
of an argument before unsheathing their cut- 
lasses. For this reason, the Lonely Man 
always avoided political discussions, and did 
his thinking where he could think to the end 
of the subject without disturbing his own 
tranquillity or that of any one else. 

No one, he mentally observed, who per- 
ceives that society has not yet become quite 
so perfectly organized as the individual, and 

lOO 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

who is willing to allow that political govern- 
ment may, for a time, be at least as useful 
as a clock-pendulum, should be considered 
a dangerous citizen. But if any one should 
hear me think that the steam which runs the 
social engine, or the spring which runs the 
social clock, may in the course of a few 
thousand years, or less time, acquire sufficient 
intelligence to regulate itself, I might be sus- 
pected of holding incendiary views which I 
really do not hold at all. 

If we are really afraid of disclosing the fact 
that the pendulum is not running the social 
clock, and is, in fact, only a more or less 
ornamental appendage which does not even 
wholly control the clock, we should take 
more pains to conceal that fact. The clock 
will surely find out sooner or later that, how- 
ever automatic it may be, it is a living organ- 
ism, and not a dead clock, and that its activity 
not only does not arise from the pendulum, 
but is even now chiefly controlled by condi- 
tions which the pendulum cannot alter, 

lOl 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

We go up and down in the land and see 
farms producing all kinds of crops, and fac- 
tories turning out all kinds of commodities, 
and railroads carrying all kinds of freight, and 
universities teaching all kinds of supposed 
knowledge, and newspapers printing all kinds 
of supposed information, and money buying 
all kinds of supposably valuable things, and 
we are deeply impressed and think the pendu- 
lum swinging back and forth in the clock 
case is doing it all; and the pendulum evi- 
dently thinks so itself. 

The poor deluded pendulum is not even 
doing a part of it, and it is not, to any very 
great extent, even directing it. The individ- 
ual man, like the individual cell or billiard ball, 
is directed and controlled by his physical, 
mental, and moral composition on the one 
hand, and by the conditions which confront 
him on the other. Political government has 
some influence in shaping these conditions, 
but far less than it imagines. Since a man 
has more life than a billiard ball, and a httle 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

more intelligence and conscience than an 
ordinary cell, he is naturally influenced by 
conditions which do not exist for the billiard 
ball or the cell. The most potent of these 
conditions are self-interest, custom, and pub- 
lic opinion J and while the governmental 
pendulum is using its friends and conciliating 
its enemies with a view to being perpetuated 
or re-elected — and incidentally drawing its 
salary, — the social organism is being really 
directed and controlled chiefly by these abstract 
but extremely powerful factors — self-interest, 
custom, and public opinion. The govern- 
mental pendulum is powerless to control any 
of these influences, but it nevertheless amuses 
itself and the rest of the clock by enacting 
laws which, if they are good, would have 
been obeyed by all decent citizens anyhow, 
and if they are bad, will be uniformly evaded 
by citizens who are, at least, fairly respectable. 
In the meantime the criminal classes continue 
to disregard any law that does not interfere 
with them, and violate any law that does. 
103 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

Political government may promote orderly- 
activity, but does not cause it, as a little re- 
flection shows. 

Owing to his nature, a man must eat ; and 
if he is too poor to buy food and too honest 
to steal it, self-interest will induce him to 
grow it if he happens to be where the con- 
ditions are suitable. Consequently, crops 
have been planted, harvested, and eaten, 
under all kinds of government, and beyond 
the jurisdiction of any. The results of sun- 
shine, fertilizing, and tillage are not materi- 
ally affected by political government or the 
absence of it ; consequently, agriculture and 
stock-raising have existed where the tick-tack 
of the governmental pendulum could not 
even be heard. Of course, in such commu- 
nities it is extremely imprudent needlessly to 
violate the rights of one's neighbors. Where 
no governmental devices exist for postpon- 
ing or defeating justice, justice is likely to be 
meted out with astonishing swiftness. The 
neighbors of the horse thief or the cattle 
104 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

" rustler " probably think, after he has been 
hanged, that if his conscience unassisted by 
law was unable to restrain him from stealing, 
it would not have restrained him from worse 
crimes if there had been any occasion for 
their commission ; and that it is more eco- 
nomical to prevent crime by the removal of 
its cause than to maintain a government for 
the punishment of criminals only after their 
crimes have been committed. 

Their reasoning is probably fallacious, but 
that is doubtless the manner of it ; and it 
does seem difficult to see how a man who is 
restrained from crime only by his fear of the 
law can be converted into a really good citi- 
zen in any other way than by hanging him. 
It seems scarcely worth while, at all events, 
to maintain a very heavy or expensive govern- 
mental pendulum for his benefit, and he is 
the only person who requires any govern- 
ment at all. 

Manufacture is as nearly independent of 
political government as is agriculture, for en- 
105 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

glnes will run sawmills wherever men want 
boards and can get engines, whether there is 
any political government there or not. 

The supply of man's mental wants is not 
more dependent upon political government 
than is the supply of his physical wants, for 
sciences and languages have been taught in 
Arabian deserts without government, and in 
some European countries in spite of it. 

We are in the habit of thinking that money, 
at least, owes all its efficiency to govern- 
ment ; but that its value rests on a foundation 
which political government cannot influence 
is apparent from the fact that money has the 
same potency under the black flag of piracy, 
where all governments are defied, that it has 
in legislative halls, where all governments are 
made. It has, unfortunately, about equal 
potency in both places, and it is difficult to 
see how the government which money can 
control, can control money. 

It does really seem as if self-interest, cus- 
tom, and public opinion were the chief fac- 
io6 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

tors that govern society. Self-interest will 
induce men to try, in the most convenient 
way, to supply their wants, either under or 
beyond governments. Custom will make 
them quite as careful in the use of table 
utensils and in the cut of their clothes — 
which governments seldom try to regulate 
— as in their observance of the Golden 
Rule — which governments pretend to try to 
enforce. The public opinion of a few hun- 
dred thousand years will take root in a man 
in the form of a conscience, and make a 
good citizen of a person who is capable of 
being a good citizen, whether he knows what 
a policeman or a jail looks like or not ; and 
no governmental clock-pendulum can create 
a conscience where it is naturally absent. 

I can imagine what my friend, the politi- 
cian, would say to these views. " My dear 
sir," I hear him say, " such opinions are sub- 
versive of all law and order. We must have 
such government as we have, for it is such 
government that prevents the individuals of 
107 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

society from burning each other's houses and 
cutting each other's throats. In a republic, 
whether the government is good or bad de- 
pends upon the character of the individuals 
themselves. They must be good citizens 
themselves, for they elect the governmental 
pendulum which tells them how to be good 
citizens, and compels them to obey their 
own instructions. Thus, it is plain that the 
government which we politicians constitute 
is the only thing that keeps people decent. 

" We preserve order and control society 
by enacting laws which you can see for 
yourself, in characteristic law English, in the 
statute books. Every one is supposed to know 
these laws, and no one does ; not even the 
lawyers. We who make them do not know 
what they mean, and therefore we have a 
supreme court to tell us. Lest the court 
itself should not know, we have taken the 
precaution to make the number of its mem- 
bers an odd number, so that a majority would 
necessarily have to vote one way or the other. 
io8 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

The vote of the majority establishes the 
meaning of the law, and, as there is always a 
majority, the court always ascertains what 
the law means. We have thus reduced the 
quality of justice to a mathematical necessity. 
" In this wilderness of laws, which no 
human being could possibly remember, you 
will find laws against murder, arson, theft, 
adultery, perjury, and other crimes, which, 
although no layman could be expected to find 
them, much less to know what they mean, 
keep you from putting a knife into your 
brother's heart just from pure love of deviltry, 
as you certainly would do if the laws were 
not there. Of course, the criminal will do it 
anyhow, just as he would if there were no 
government; but, if public opinion is strong 
enough, he will sometimes be caught — just 
as he would be without the aid of govern- 
ment. Instead of spending a few minutes, 
as a conscientious vigilance committee would, 
in trying — honestly trying — to find out 
whether he is guilty or not, we will take him 
109 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

into court and appoint one lawyer to prove 
that he is guilty, whether he is or not ; and 
another to prove that he is not guilty, 
whether he is or not. If the prosecuting 
attorney knows facts which would render 
guilt questionable, or if the defendant's attor- 
ney knows facts that would prove guilt with 
absolute certainty, each will be expected care- 
fully to conceal such facts in order that jus- 
tice may be properly administered. In order 
still further to insure justice, we select a jury 
of twelve men who must be so intelligent 
that they do not read or form opinions ; and 
after this jury has* been properly enlightened 
by the efforts of two opposing lawyers to 
conceal the two respective halves of the 
truth, it will be instructed by the judge in 
everything except what it needs to know ; 
namely, what the verdict should be. The 
consequence is that the verdict is sure to be 
just. 

" We have taken still further precautions 
to conserve the interests of society, by mak- 
iio 



BOOKS, IDEALISxM, GOVERNMENT 

ing it possible for certain high officials to 
pardon the criminal if he should happen to 
be convicted. 

"Now, since all statutory law is intended 
to be a mere amplification of the Golden 
Rule, — a mere detailed explanation of the 
moral obligations of the several members of 
society to each other, — it is plain that the 
making, interpretation, and execution of the 
laws should be in the hands of the most intel- 
ligent and moral men in the community. 
You must have observed that such is the 
case. A glance at any legislature, city coun- 
cil, or police force will at once convince you 
that the affairs of the government are in the 
hands of the most enlightened, moral, and re- 
fined gentlemen in the whole social organism. 
Indeed, it could not be otherwise. The 
habits which politicians must practice to ex- 
tend their acquaintance and increase their 
popularity, and the associations which they 
must keep up to retain their influence, natu- 
rally have an elevating and refining influence 
m 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

upon them and would tend to exalt them 
morally even if they were naturally less 
scrupulously moral than they are. 

" Since the government is in the hands of 
such gentlemen, it cannot fail to represent a 
higher standard of morals than that which is 
represented by the general conscience of the 
whole community ; in fact, by the universal 
conscience of man, which you call public 
opinion. Of course, if the general con- 
science can give expression to itself in the 
statute books, it becomes the proper standard, 
not because it is the general conscience, but 
because it is law. You have noticed how 
easily the voice of the general conscience 
becomes embodied in the law. 

" Of course, in monarchies, it is difficult 
for the social organism to give complete ex- 
pression to its will in the government, but 
there is no difficulty of that kind in a re- 
public. Three or four cliques of politicians, 
each consisting of a dozen or more men, will 
attend to the matter for you, since you can- 

112 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

not possibly attend to it for yourself unless 
you devote your whole life to it. Each 
clique will give you an opportunity to vote 
for one man for each office. If one man 
does not happen to suit you, you can vote for 
any one of the two or three others. 

" You tell me that you approve of a gov- 
ernment which represents the greater part, or 
even the greatest one of several parts, of the 
sum of all the individual wills in the com- 
munity, but that you would like to be assured 
of being able to contribute the expression of 
your own will to the formation of that sum. 
While you do not want the community to 
submit to your will, you want the assurance 
that your will shall be heard and added to the 
rest before majorities or pluralities are esti- 
mated. 

" This assurance you have. For example, 
if you live in a community of a hundred mil- 
lions of souls and want to vote for your 
neighbor Jones for governor, each one of the 
three or four cliques will nominate a man, 
8 113 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

and thus your worthy neighbor will have 
three or four chances in a hundred millions 
of being nominated ; and in most communities 
you cannot vote for him unless he is nomi- 
nated. You will thus have three or four 
chances in a hundred millions of having a 
chance to give expression to your poor little 
insignificant will. 

" If you would give as much attention to 
politics as we professional politicians who 
attend to nothing else, — thus furnishing a 
beautiful example of good citizenship, — you 
would have a still greater chance of having a 
chance to give expression to your will ; but 
it would be unreasonable to expect a greater 
latitude of choice than we give you. As it 
is, a few dozen men decide for a few mil- 
lions which ones of these millions shall con- 
stitute the three or four to be selected from. 
This allows you even greater latitude of 
choice than can be enjoyed in an absolute 
monarchy, where one clique has got complete 
control of the government. 
114 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

"The difference between the republican 
and the monarchical cliques is that the mo- 
narchical are born of distinguished families, 
while the republican are bred of political 
bosses." 

Here the Lonely Man paused and listened, 
for it almost seemed to him that the stillness 
had been broken by a harsh, rasping sound. 
It was, however, only the impression pro- 
duced by the last word, and he did not see 
how he could have selected a different word. 
In fact, he did not see how he could at any 
point have altered the speech which he had 
put into the politician's mouth, for he had 
frequently heard him make what would have 
been this speech if it had been rendered into 
exact English. 

I must admit (he reflected) that in this 

form the speech sounds somewhat satirical, 

but the satirical effect does not proceed from 

me. It merely arises from reducing the 

115 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

speech to language which shows precisely 
what it means, and then comparing it with 
the truth. 

If I were not alone I should not consider 
the speech in its relation to the truth. It 
would not be polite ; but in solitude the 
laws of politeness cannot be transgressed 
even by allowing one's thoughts to drift 
toward the truth. 

I should be unwilling to cause the poli- 
tician the slightest annoyance, for he is a 
proverbially " good fellow," and as he is no 
worse than we make him, I really think he 
is entitled to courteous treatment — treat- 
ment more courteous, in fact, than that 
which he himself habitually administers, dur- 
ing the heat of a political campaign, to his 
brother politician of any opposing political 
party. If instead of thinking what he has 
told me about himself, I had thought what 
his brother politician has told me about him, 
I should have spoiled my mind for all re- 
spectable thinking in the future. 
ii6 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

But I do not believe the politician and his 
brother are as bad as they accuse each other 
of being. They are still in some measure 
useful, but the measure of their usefulness is 
less than they pretend to believe it is. The 
government which they give us is still, and 
may always be, in some respects necessary. 
A small community may be able to dispense 
with political government altogether, but a 
large one cannot till self-interest becomes 
something more than ordinary selfishness, 
and public opinion comes more nearly into 
harmony with truth, and custom accords 
better with conscience and justice. Already 
these three factors shape the course of events 
in any civilized community to a far greater 
extent than does any political government; 
and their influence is constantly increasing. 
It will continue to increase till political gov- 
ernment becomes more nearly nominal than 
it now is, and then we may begin to wonder 
whether the influence of self-interest, public 
opinion, and custom will ever become so 
117 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

powerful that it will absolutely control the 
course of human events, and leave nothing 
for political government to do. 

It will not, till self-interest becomes some- 
thing which will impel the individual to seek 
primarily the advancement of the race, and 
to seek his own advancement only so far as 
such advancement may proceed without in- 
jury to any other human being. It will not, 
till public opinion becomes so true and so 
strong that the individual will fear it more 
than he now fears the punishments of the 
law. It will not, till custom becomes more 
nearly uniform and comes so far into har- 
mony with conscience that private practice 
and public profession will agree. Then 
the current of human events will be so far 
removed from the control of political gov- 
ernment that the governmental pendulum 
will undergo spontaneous atrophy from lack 
of exercise, and either entirely disappear or 
become so rudimentary that no good citizen 
will be annoyed or alarmed by its ticking, as 
ii8 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

he now most assuredly is by every political 
campaign and every session of a parliament 
or a legislature. 

In the meantime, it is possible that good 
citizens might spend their time just as profit- 
ably in trying to educate public opinion so 
that it will always be a safe and compelling 
guide as they could in tinkering with the 
pendulum. The pendulum likes to receive 
attentions; it thrives on them. If the atten- 
tions are somewhat violent, it thrives all the 
better; for naturally, the more violently a pen- 
dulum is pushed, the more violently it swings 
back. If the pendulum is in some meas- 
ure an organ of a living organism, as any 
governmental pendulum is, the exercise has 
the same effect on the pendulum that it would 
have on a muscle. It promotes its growth 
and increases its strength. Any malcontent 
who thinks he can destroy a governmen- 
tal pendulum by attacking its representatives 
with physical violence should remember that 
no dumb sheep ever stopped a swing by 
119 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

butting it, and that so long as there are mur- 
derers like himself to be hanged, there will 
be at least one valid reason for the existence 
of the government which he would like to 
destroy. An educated conscience would re- 
strain one from committing murder, but it 
would not confer upon one a relish for 
hanging murderers. One would still prefer, 
when there is any hanging to be done, that 
the sheriff should do it. 

However, even if the pendulum does like 
attention, we cannot afford to devote all our 
time to teaching the politicians how to teach 
us to be good; we must spend some time 
in learning how to be good without being 
taught by a politician, and how to feel 
ashamed when we are bad, without the aid 
of a policeman. 

When we offer to the politician this ex- 
planation of our indifference to politics, he 
softly smiles in a sweetly supercilious way, 
and mildly expresses his contempt of a kind 
of social order that depends upon an educated 
1 20 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

moral sense instead of statutory law. It is a 
pleasant little way of his, but in his gentle 
derision of the force of public opinion he 
forgets that the only potency of statutory law 
is that which public opinion and custom give 
it. If he doubts it, let him enact a law that 
will be universally condemned by public 
opinion ; and if he thinks his laws are 
stronger than custom, let him try, by statu- 
tory enactments, to alter the style in ball 
dresses or street costumes. 

If, instead of enacting any more laws 
against obtaining money under false pre- 
tences, we should try to create a public 
opinion that would condemn such practices, 
it might presently become as reprehensible to 
cheat in a horse trade as it now is to eat pie 
with a knife. Law makes the one wrong : 
custom, the other ; yet many a man who 
would consider himself disgraced for life if 
he should be caught in the violation of the 
custom does not scruple to violate the law 
and boast of it afterwards. 

121 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

There are honest fellows who, in the 
manipulation of their table utensils, do not 
always comply with the requirements of 
polite usage, and who still refrain from cheat- 
ing in their dealings ; but that it is not stat- 
utory law which restrains these persons is 
evidenced by the fact that they are precisely 
the men who know least about the law and 
care least about its intricacies. They are 
honest simply because they think it is right 
to be honest. 

If, instead of enacting any more laws for 
the purpose of making ourselves pay our debts, 
we should get into the habit of simply paying 
them, and considering it immoral not to pay 
them, the practice of promptly paying just 
claims might presently become as nearly uni- 
versal as is the practice of "tipping" negro 
waiters and sleeping car porters. Neither 
statutory law nor conscience compels us to 
give " tips," but custom does — and we do it. 

In our idolatry of statutory law, it may 
be well to bear in mind that a statute is 

122 



BOOKS, IDEALISM, GOVERNMENT 

nothing but a politician's words preserved in 
ink ; its potency is what the public conscience 
gives it, and no more. We have made vio- 
lations of the moral law illegal by statutory 
enactments ; it might now be well to make 
them disgraceful, also, by stimulating the 
public conscience. And if, while we are 
teaching ourselves to be honest for the love 
of honesty, we should have any time to de- 
vote to politicians and their laws, we might 
spend it in weeping at the spectacle of a 
legislature trying, by laws of its own enact- 
ment, to prevent itself from accepting bribes. 



123 




IV 

THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

WHEN the Lonely Man resumed his 
thinking, he fell to wondering whether 
such purely physical comforts as food, warmth, 
and a good smoke, and such purely mental 
pleasures as reading and reflection, can really 
satisfy a man. 

He quickly decided that however much 
better than non-existence they may make 
existence, they still leave something to be 
desired. 



Can a human being really be satisfied by 
any means ? he mused. I have never known 
one who was. At least, I have never known 
124 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

one who would admit it. I have noticed, 
however, that he who most loudly proclaims 
the vanity of life clings most tenaciously to 
life and to its vanities — especially to its 
vanities. 

It may be (he reflected) that cursing the 
miseries that one does not have enhances 
the joys that one does have. Thus, a little 
dog barks most savagely at a big one when 
he is on the safe side of the fence. He seems 
to intensify his realization of his own safety 
by snarling at a danger which cannot reach 
him. The pessimist may do the same thing 
for the same reason; for, when there is no 
protecting fence, there is likely to be more 
running than barking, among men as well as 
among dogs. 

At all events, the comfort of the body and 
the entertainment of the mind can satisfy 
only two of the persons in the human trinity, 
and man has a threefold being. Of course, 
anatomically, he does not have. Anatom- 
ically he is only a body ; but, if it can be 

I2S 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

avoided, one does not consider one's self 
anatomically in good society, which my 
society is. 

Man has a body, a mind, and a heart. 
This is not anatomical, but it is true; and it 
will not do to say that the heart is a mere 
part of the body, and that the mind is a mere 
molecular motion of another part. Anatom- 
ically this may be true. In the dissecting 
room and the laboratory it certainly appears 
to be true, but one misses some things in the 
dissecting room and the laboratory which one 
notices in daily life ; the mind and the heart, 
for example. And since one must have 
names for things even to think about them, 
it is best to employ the names in common 
use, even if the same names are also employed 
to denote objects which, in the dissecting 
room and the laboratory, turn out to be mere 
organs and functions of the body. 

Mental phenomena are doubtless dependent 
upon molecular changes in the brain, but they 
themselves are not molecular changes, how- 
126 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

ever inseparable from such changes they may 
be. These phenomena are the subjective 
side of mind, which is just as real as the 
objective side. Without the aid of his own 
subjectivity, the new psychologist could never 
interpret his objective findings in the labora- 
tory. The old psychology had its uses ; it 
gave man a mind and a heart, which he still 
has — sometimes. 

And now, the question before me is, Can 
man employ his body and his mind so ac- 
tively and so agreeably that he can be satis- 
fied without employing his heart at all ? 

It is impossible to study satisfaction objec- 
tively. We may take the other fellow's 
word and assume that he is satisfied when he 
says he is, or looks as we think we should 
look if we were satisfied ; but this is pure 
subjectivity — sometimes ours, and sometimes 
the other fellow's. 

Having arrived at this conclusion, and con- 
sidering his own subjectivity as good as any, 
127 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

the Lonely Man allowed his thoughts to drift 
back through the past in search of a time 
when his physical and mental delights were 
sufficient to make him happy without any 
apparent aid from his heart. He seemed to 
be finding it, but in order to make a better 
roadway for his mind he lighted his pipe, and 
in the clouds of smoke he followed back the 
past till it quite eluded him. 

At this point he saw himself, a little wide- 
eyed interrogation point — if an interrogation 
point may be supposed to have eyes — emerg- 
ing from a deeper past into whose darkness 
he could not penetrate. 

" Ah, I missed it," he said. " I must think 
in the other direction." 

So he let the indistinct and fleeting visions 
in the smoke sweep up to the less distant 
past, and then he found the time of which 
he was in search. It was a winter of his 
early childhood. 

How snow and cold and winter storms 
had come to have the fascination for him 

128 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

which they had he did not know, but these 
things seemed to have given this winter all 
the special charm it had ; and it had always 
seemed to him that the witchery of winter 
gets more quickly into any healthy human 
blood than does the charm of any other sea- 
son in the year. 

This winter had been an ideal one. Its 
days had been so cold that each one was a 
winter in itself. The sun had ceased to be 
of any use except to light the world by day 
and mark the advent of the night by setting. 
When it had disappeared behind the snow- 
drifts in the west, and its icy light had quite 
died out, the wind commenced its revels, like 
some mighty giant, tossing all this arctic 
world of snowdrifts in the air, and heaping 
up the snow in other drifts that seemed to 
please its fancy better. He almost seemed 
to sit again beside the roaring evening fire 
and listen to the storm's hoarse voice as it 
bellowed round the house and went shrieking 
through the tree-tops. He saw the red glow 
9 129 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

creeping up the panting stove, as it bade de- 
fiance to the storm. More wood was piled 
upon the flames, and when the iron door was 
opened to admit the wood, a flood of light 
lit up the room and painted weirdly dancing 
shadows on the wall. He heard the sweep 
and swish of drifting snow, and felt the 
quaking of the house as it received the heavy 
broadsides of the storm. He heard the low- 
ing of the cattle muflied by the rush and 
roar of the wind. A frightened crow cawed 
overhead, as it was tumbled through the 
upper air. Then an impish little tongue of 
snow came darting through the keyhole, and 
he heard the door resist the onslaught of a 
heavy blast of wind. This was a carnival 
of Nature for the entertainment of a boy 
who was not old enough to fear. 

Then while every night was cold, not all 
were stormy. Sometimes the moon shone 
down upon a world as silent as a tomb and 
whiter than its marble walls. A creaking 
footstep could be heard a mile away. The 
130 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

hooting of an owl would lend its weirdness to 
the silence and make the snow-clad trees seem 
more like spectres than they seemed before. 

But the halo of glory which gentle time 
weaves about the past does not obliterate or 
even obscure the prosaic fact that the joys of 
childhood are, to a great extent, those which 
one shares with animals and cannibals. They 
are the joys of eating and drinking. Con- 
sequently, mingled with the Lonely Man's 
visions of the outer world's picturesqueness, 
there were memories of those pleasures which 
appeal less to the imagination than to the 
appetite. There were visions of a table 
laden with smoking dishes, whose teasing 
fragrance crept under doors and into one's 
nostrils a half-hour before supper was ready, 
and made one think that half-hour a quarter 
of a century. There were memories of 
things so good to eat that their taste lingered 
in the^ mouth after one was through, and 
made one sorrowful that one could eat no 
more. It got into one's memory and, 
131 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

in after years, sometimes made one wonder 
whether the world had forgotten how to 
cook, or one had merely lost the keenness 
of one's appetite. There were memories of 
turkeys in every stage of evolution from eggs 
to drumsticks. There were recollections of 
irresistibly sweet things that came out of 
glass jars from obscure shelves in the cellar, 
and of bags of nuts half hidden in the mys- 
terious dimness of the same cellar, and of 
bounteous apple-bins and the insidious fra- 
grance of their striped contents ; and running 
through it all was the poetry of winter and 
the unspoiled appetite of a boy. 

He had found the time of which he had 
been in search, but this vision of the past 
was marred by the conspicuousness of the 
gastronomic part of it. It was disquieting to 
regard his happiness the result of cannibalism, 
yet how could he help it? His dream of this 
ideal winter of his childhood had been, aside 
from the weather, a dream of cooked animals 
and raw fruit. His chief pleasure seemed, at 
the present moment, to have been derived 
132 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

from eating these things. He could see no 
complete break in his relationship to all the 
things that live and grow in the world ; and, 
by all authorities, a man — or a boy — who 
eats his relatives is a cannibal. 

We must eat these things, he mused, in 
order to live, for one cannot live on air and 
water; and even if one could, could one be 
absolutely certain that inorganic things are as 
dead as they seem, and that the boundary be- 
tween them and organic things is any more 
distinct than that between the vegetable and 
the animal world ? 

As his thoughts dwelt on a universe teem- 
ing with living beings that find their most 
substantial pleasure in devouring their brothers 
and cousins, he was oppressed by a momen- 
tary suspicion that this world is not a felicific 
institution. 

Perhaps (he reflected) hunger is merely an 
unrecognized form of fraternal love, which 
^33 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

impels us to elevate the creatures which we 
eat to our own exalted plane of life, — which 
we do when we convert their substance into 
our own. These creatures would undoubt- 
edly enjoy being eaten if they could under- 
stand the purpose of the act, and realize what 
they gain by playing the passive role in the 
process of digestion. 

This was certainly a new interpretation of 
brotherly love, but the Lonely Man could 
really see no other interpretation of it that 
would enable him under all circumstances to 
practise such love. When he attempted, 
however, to realize in thought the bliss of 
having that done to him which he was doing 
three times a day to " others," he was grate- 
ful that there is no higher animal than man 
to favor him by doing it. 

Then it suddenly occurred to him that 

man is not so fortunate — or unfortunate — 

as he appears to be. He is finally digested 

himself, by Nature. She gives up her sim- 

134 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

plest substance to plants, which give up theirs 
to animals, which give up theirs to man, who 
gives his back to Nature, which (or who) is 
doubtless edified by the whole process. 

" Ha," he exclaimed aloud, " I have nar- 
rowly escaped conclusions that would shortly 
have become dismal. How comforting it is 
to perceive that this whole process of eating 
and being eaten, and dying and being born 
again at numerous different places at the same 
time — this process of integration and dis- 
integration — is a mere process whereby the 
soul of Nature (or — to speak philosophically 
— the thing-in-itself ) comes to itself ! " 

Then supposing that he knew what he 
meant by the " soul of Nature,'* and " the 
thing-in-itself," and "comes to itself," he 
fell into a complacent frame of mind which 
permitted his thoughts to slip back to where 
he had left himself destroying potential 
trees by eating hickory nuts, and destroying 
actual poultry by eating fried chicken in 
a little old farmhouse half buried in snow, 
135 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

some — ah, never mind how many — years 
ago. 

As when one turns to look a second time 
at a painting in which the first look revealed 
nothing but the manual skill of the artist, 
so now the Lonely Man turned his mental 
vision once more upon the scenes he had just 
reviewed. He was not exactly certain that 
his heart had had no part in the satisfaction 
which his memory had brought to light. 
There began to steal upon him a conviction 
that he would not have had this satisfaction 
if he had not found it in an atmosphere of 
love ; and the longer he mused, the more 
distinct the conviction became. If one looks 
long enough at a great painting, one presently 
sees past the colored figures in it, and into 
the artist's soul that seeks expression in the 
painting and gives the beauty and the mean- 
ing to it. So now the Lonely Man saw past 
the forms of such things as snowdrifts and 
food, and saw the source and meaning of 
their charm. 

136 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

From the dim chaos of his recollections 
there presently emerged a woman with a 
face of singular sweetness, from which the 
ravages of time had not removed the beauty 
even when old age had crowned her head 
with white, and traced the record of her 
weeping at the corners of her eyes, and 
dropped a blood clot in her brain to make 
her blind, and then another clot to dim her 
mental vision, and then in mercy quickly 
dropped another one to make her sleep the 
dreamless sleep. It was his mother's face. 

What memories of loving deeds and of 
a mother's loving tenderness flit through his 
mind as his fancy plays about the fireside 
of his boyhood home the present writer can- 
not tell. He cannot see so deep into an- 
other's soul that he can follow fancy far 
when it begins to play upon the heart-strings; 
and if he could, he has not the skill to make 
another feel what he would see there, for his 
pen is not the rod of Moses, which was said 
to have the power to melt a rock in Horeb 
137 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

and make it weep, and no less a power could 
do justice to such a theme ; and if he had 
the skill he would not use it to lay bare a 
human heart before a world that is not 
always tender in its treatment of such things 
as hearts. 

But shall we say the Lonely Man has no 
heart because we do not see one ? Does 
the swordsman have no soft left hand because 
his sword hand is the one we make him use 
most, while he keeps his other hand behind 
his back ? Have we not been taught by 
both precept and example that hearts should 
be concealed as if it were a crime to have 
one? Have not learned books been written 
to show that a man is ten different kinds of 
degenerate if he has a heart at all ? And 
have we not so far profited by our teaching 
that we hide away our hearts in these things 
we call ourselves and show the world, while 
we try to satisfy our hearts with the vicarious 
emotions provided by the novelist and the 
play-writer ? 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

But it does not satisfy them : it is like 
trying to satisfy a healthy appetite with a 
bonbon. Did you never go supperless to one 
of those receptions where every one is well 
dressed and a man stands holding three sep- 
arate dishes in his hands and drinks an ounce 
of tea and eats a biscuit as large as a postage 
stamp and feebly smiles and tries to look 
happy while doing it ? Does it satisfy ? 
No; you hunt up the hostess before all the 
restaurants close for the night and tell her 
with a winning little smile that you have 
had a delightful evening, and then you go 
to one of those places where men sit with 
their hats on at tables without covers, where 
there is no carpet on the floor and the 
waiter calls out " Brau one ! " and brings you 
beef and potatoes, and you eat, and eat, and 
eat till you have had enough. 

Has your heart never rebelled in the same 
way after you have tried to feed it with eso- 
teric philosophy at the shrine of an intellect 
dressed in a woman's gown ? And have you 
T^Z9 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

not in starved desperation sought the whole- 
some presence of the landlady's daughter, 
who has real round arms and a pretty face 
and lips that like to be kissed and an actual 
heart, even if her hair is not always tidy, 
nor her shoes always laced, nor her apron 
always straight, and though she is innocent 
of Brownino; and never heard of Emerson ? 

Were you altogether a criminal if your 
feelings went a little further than you in- 
tended, and you fell in love with her and had 
to tell her a few lies to prevent her from 
falling in love with you and letting you marry 
her and make her miserable for life ? 

Oh, yes, we all have hearts whether it is 
proper and desirable to have them or not, and 
they play grotesque pranks on us, now and 
then, to punish us for our stupid treatment of 
them. The Lonely Man has a heart ; and 
as he sees his mother's pretty face bending 
over him — a boy of six once more — and 
feels her tears fall on his tender foot to ease 
the pain she caused by pulling out a thorn, 
140 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

and hears her frightened voice at night inquir- 
ing why he groans when he thinks his head 
will split, and thinks of all the thousand other 
ways in which his mother's hand and heart 
have given their only charm to all the other 
charms his boyhood home has ever had, his 
eyes grow dim and he sighs and says aloud, 
" No satisfaction is complete unless it satisfies 
the heart. However we may placate our- 
selves with makeshift substitutes, there is no 
substitute for this." 

He leaned farther back in his chair and 
stared through the clouds of smoke at the 
ceiling, to compose his mind for the business 
of deciding how this satisfaction may be 
found. 

Presently he took up the theme again and 
reflected that it would be unreasonable to 
expect a mother's love throughout life. 

In the natural course of events (he mused) 
mothers must generally die before their off- 
spring. Even if they did not, and if we 
141 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

could have their love throughout life, it would 
not always satisfy the heart. With the ad- 
vent of manhood the heart longs for more 
than childhood gave it. So, let me suppose 
I am standing upon the threshold of manhood 
and am casting about for something that will 
satisfy the heart as fully as it was satisfied in 
childhood. 

My heart is no longer that of a child ; its 
satisfaction will no longer be a simple matter. 
Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect to satisfy 
it at all ; but why should it be ? Childhood 
was a period of credulity and was oppressed 
by a thousand groundless fears which the 
knowledge of later years has dispelled. The 
pretty soap-bubbles of childhood were most 
disappointingly fragile. The wisdom of 
manhood should enable me to fix my affec- 
tions upon durable things, and the enlarged 
capacity of manhood should enable me to 
enjoy these things better. 

So I decide that, the satisfaction of the 
heart being possible and being the most im- 
142 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

portant thing in life, — the only thing, in fact, 
which makes life worth living, — the finding 
of such satisfaction may reasonably be con- 
sidered the serious business of life. I look 
around to see how the world goes about it, 
and I find that, in the present organization 
of society, the most serious business of life 
consists chiefly in trying to get the biggest 
piece of pie for one's self. This, then, must 
be the means of satisfying the heart ; and I 
untie myself from my mother's apron strings 
at twenty-five, — at twenty, nay, at sixteen, 
— and get into the line at the pie counter 
as quickly as possible. Never mind how I 
get in. If I am strong enough, I elbow 
some other man out and take his place. My 
object is a worthy one. It is the satisfac- 
tion of the heart. Therefore I elbow my 
fellow-man out of his place, as I could not 
possibly do if I had a heart worth satisfy- 
ing, and endeavor to get my hands on as 
much pie as possible without any needless 
delay. 

143 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

The other man may be the better man, 
but the crowd at the pie counter will not 
think so if I get ahead of him in the scramble 
for pie. It is their approbation which will 
make me as happy as I was on those winter 
evenings at the fireside of my boyhood home. 

The more pie I get, the happier I shall be, 
so I shall grab in a way that will teach men 
how to grab as they never grabbed before; 
and I shall look pretty while doing it. I 
shall take a whole pie — nay, as many of 
them as I can drag off the counter. Of 
course I cannot eat them, but I can keep 
them and turn them over and count them. 
Ha, the joy of it! hoarding pies which are 
spoiling for the want of eating ! 

Of course, if I should meet my fellow- 
creatures in what I am pleased to call society, 
I should not think of trying to get all the pie 
on the table. I should be courteous and 
considerate there, and should feel extremely 
uncomfortable if I should even seem to try 
to get more than my share of pie or any 
144 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

other good thing ; but such social amenities 
are mere relaxations from the serious business 
of life. They could not satisfy the heart as 
the pretty scramble at the pie counter does. 

If I can find no other use for my pies, I 
shall bribe men with some of them to help 
me to get more. Then my pile of pies will 
increase the faster, and the pies down at 
the lower end of the counter will begin 
to become scarce, and hungry fellows will 
scramble for them In a way that will stimu- 
late me by the force of example and keep 
me from forgetting, as I might otherwise 
do, that a pie is, after all, a very good 
thing. For if I eat pie, and handle pie, and 
smell pie, and see nothing but pie, and dream 
of nothing but pie, and read of nothing at a 
breakfast of pie except pie, I shall need the 
stimulus of other men's example to keep my 
gorge from rising at the thought of pie. 

If it rise in spite of me and I throw away 
in disgust all the pie I do not really need, 
what then ? Ah, what then, indeed ! 
^° 145 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

The other heavy pie-owners will not be 
likely to follow my example, and therefore 
the strenuousness of the struggle at the lower 
end of the counter will not relax, and the 
sight of this struggle among men who are 
really hungry for pie will keep the heavy 
owners constantly reminded of the value of 
pie ; and thus, the grabbing will go merrily 
on. All of my discarded pies will be quickly 
appropriated by men who will not need them, 
and when I become normally hungry myself, 
as I presently shall, I shall be unable to find 
either my pies or my place at the counter. 
Therefore, I shall not be so foolish as to give 
up my place at the pie counter. If I must 
choose between starvation and surfeit, I shall 
choose the latter. I am not responsible for 
the present competitive system at the world's 
pie counter, and though I may perceive the 
mockery of it all and the terribleness of it all, 
I do not wish to starve. 

When my pile of pies grows so appallingly 
large as to shut out all hope of any of the 
146 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

really precious things of life, I shall take a 
few pies ofF the top of the pile and build a 
university with them in which men shall be 
taught the language of Atlantis and how to 
get pies. 

If, in spite of this, I notice between my 
grabs for more pies a slight hiatus in my 
satisfaction and happiness which might, be 
filled by something not to be found in a pie 
shop, — something which the present pie- 
grabbing system does not encourage, some- 
thing which always did and always will satisfy 
the heart, — I shall grab the harder. When 
my heart calls for love, I shall give it pie. 
That will be both logical and effective. Who 
has not noticed how effective it is? 

If I do not make mere money-making my 
profession, — if I choose a trade, or agricul- 
ture, or one of the liberal arts or learned 
professions, — I must still do the most stren- 
uous work of my life at the pie counter. 
Whether I choose carpentering or preaching, 
the skill and energy which I shall employ in 
147 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

the practice of my calling will be as nothing 
to that which I shall be compelled to employ 
in order to get some other man's opportunity 
to practise it at all, and to get pies by so do- 
ing. Whatever my vocation may be, I must 
follow it, not for the love of humanity, but 
as a means of enabling me to get the biggest 
possible piece of pie; and my success in that 
vocation will be measured, not by the good I 
shall do, but by the number of pies I shall 
be able to get. 

But suppose this should not satisfy my 
heart, — and I begin to suspect that it would 
not, — where shall I look for that satisfaction 
which is the source and foundation of all 
other satisfaction ? If I cannot stifle the 
longing to love and be loved, how shall I 
satisfy that longing ? 

I might love my fellow-men. Ah, but that 
would be perilous to my success at the pie 
counter. How could I trample on my fellow- 
beings there if I loved them ? And if I did 
not trample on them and get the best of 
148 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 



them, what pleasure would the struggle for 
pies afford me ? 

Imagine people at the pie counter of the 
world loving one another as the members of 
an ideal family love one another ! Imagine 
them waiting politely for their turns to be 
served ! Imagine them regarding it a pleas- 
ure to assist their fellows to get pies 1 Im- 
agine them leaving the table when they have 
had enough ! Imagine them not being so 
abnormal as to stuff their pockets with pies 
which they cannot possibly eat or put to 
any other sane use ! That would not be 
"business." 

Then, shall I be able to love those who 
will show by their fierce struggle against me 
that they do not love me — whose hands will 
be raised against me even as my hand will be 
raised against them ? 

Up at the prosperous end of the counter I 

may find that my competitors will carry 

about with them what a certain distinguished 

Professor at a certain famous Breakfast Table 

149 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

calls an atmosphere of grace, mercy, and 
peace, at least six feet in radius. While I 
am within the narrow limits of that atmos- 
phere, I may feel that I am the object of my 
fellow-creature's good-will. For this brief 
moment the weapons of warfare will be 
sheathed, and we shall feel something of the 
fraternal love which we might, under other 
conditions, feel and practise at all times. 
When we meet at the well-ordered table, 
and hear the ready footfall of trim servants, 
and fall under the spell of luxurious sur- 
roundings, I shall, for some two hours, for- 
get that we have spent our lives in trying to 
snatch from one another that pie which we 
now so gladly share. I shall, for these two 
hours, forget that on the morrow these hands, 
which give the hearty welcome and the part- 
ing clasp, will be engaged in snatching pie 
from mine. For these two hours I may love 
my fellow-man. 

But if I go down to the lower end of the 
counter where the brutality of the struggle 
150 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

is not softened by a halo of good feeling 
even six feet in radius, shall I be able to 
love the fellow-men whom I shall find 
there ? 

I shall find many men there whose hearts 
are as large and as warm and as true as any that 
I shall find anywhere in this world, but I shall 
find others who are there only because they 
are less cunning than I, and not at all be- 
cause they are less selfish. When I read the 
coarseness of their natures in the coarseness 
of their lives, and the hardness of their hearts 
in the harsh lines of their faces, and their 
hatred of me in the cold gleam in their eyes, 
shall I love them ? When I hear some of 
the noisiest of them curse me to my face as 
the author of a system which they as well as 
I practise ; when I hear them preach a doc- 
trine of fire and blood and hate and murder, 
unsoftened by any trace or semblance of love 
for any living creature, shall I fall upon their 
necks and love them ? No ! I shall slink 
shudderingly back to the suffocating atmos- 
151 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

phere of my pile of pies where men at least 
know how to mask their warfare with a show 
of breeding ; but I shall not satisfy my heart 
there, nor anywhere else at the pie counter 
of the world. There can no longer be any 
doubt about that. 

Where, then, shall I seek this satisfaction ? 
Some say they find it in religion. 

Here the Lonely Man paused and smiled 
wearily. While he had been musing on the 
melancholy struggle for existence, he had 
been vaguely aware of a large subject that 
loomed indistinctly out beyond the horizon 
of clear consciousness, In the direction in 
which his thoughts had seemed to be drift- 
ing. He had hoped that this subject would 
be cheerful. It had turned out to be re- 
ligion ; and, as he recalled his childhood 
struggle with the Shorter Catechism, The 
Pilgrim's Progress, Fox's Book of Martyrs, 
and the Book of Judges, he could not con- 
scientiously say that it always is cheerful. 
152 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

Then, It generally has a most inconvenient 
way of requiring a person to carry about with 
him two minds, — one for religious thinking 
and the other for the practical affairs of life ; 
and since both minds are housed in the same 
skull, when religion slips into the house with- 
out knocking it is as likely to stumble against 
one tenant as the other. If the worldly host 
should happen to be the one to greet the re- 
ligious guest, some startling things are likely 
to happen. 

The Lonely Man was, in his own way, 
religious, and he had the greatest liking for 
many people who were religious in their way, 
although their way was generally not his. 
He had an abiding faith in the ultimate real- 
ization of universal love, and this had always 
seemed to him to be the essence of any re- 
ligion worth considering j and it had seemed, 
in a more or less indefinite way, to imply an 
eternal continuity of human existence, and 
something like a divine intelligence behind 
the phenomena of the universe. . 
153 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

But he had often wondered if he was not 
congenitally deficient in that duality of mind 
which enables a person to get along smoothly 
with the mysticism and supernaturalism of 
any orthodox religion, in this world of most 
intense naturalism. 

He indistinctly recollected that in his most 
distant childhood he had, like a little atheist, 
taken the eternity of the universe for granted, 
till some one had told him that it could not 
possibly have been here if a Creator had not 
made it out of nothing and put it here, and 
that it would be extremely imprudent to enter- 
tain the slightest doubt on that point. Then 
he had immediately begun to wonder how 
the Creator could be here without having 
been made out of nothing and put here, and 
how he could make a universe out of noth- 
ing anyhow; and he had wondered more or 
less about it ever since, and had sometimes 
been impious enough to wonder if the mys- 
tery could not really be simplified — for little 
boys at least — by assuming that the divinity 
154 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

and the manifestation of the material uni- 
verse are co-eternal and have some common 
substance. He had never gone so far as to 
say that he really believed this to be true, but 
he was convinced that if such a theory would 
satisfy the requirements of a religion, it would 
be the safest possible theory to carry around 
in this matter-of-fact world, for it would 
need no protection from those obstinate things 
called facts, and might be kicked about all 
day with almost as little danger of being 
injured as if it were a fact itself. 

However impossible of demonstration the 
truths of religion may be (he reflected), they 
appear to be equally impossible of refutation. 
Man, therefore, continues to be a religious 
animal, and since he must receive religion 
itself by faith, he opens the doors of faith so 
wide that many other things than the essen- 
tials of religion slip through the doorway and 
are as tenaciously held as the essence of re- 
ligion itself. 

155 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

Some indefinite but momentous truth sug- 
gested by hope, and more or less securely 
supported by observation and experience, 
slips into the mind, accompanied by a large 
assortment of more definite but less probable 
suppositions. The mind immediately clothes 
the truth with the materials of the less prob- 
able suppositions, and binds the clothes on so 
securely that the poor little truth can never 
get out to show its face without assistance, 
and would probably frighten its host if it did. 

Now, if some bold iconoclast comes along 
and begins to take ofF these dead habiliments 
to see if perchance they may not conceal 
some living truth which would be the better 
for a breath or two of air, the possessor of 
the truth holds up his hands in horror, applies 
opprobrious epithets to the iconoclast, and 
will never be satisfied till he has coaxed his 
truth back into its winding-sheet and made a 
mummy of it again. 

The early astronomers took off a part of 
the graveclothes of religion, and thereby got 
156 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

themselves into their own, more 's the pity ; 
but the sextons who had charge of religion's 
body had no difficulty in finding enough 
other shrouds to wrap up their truth again 
to the point of suffocation, and they wrapped 
it up and put it back into its vault. Some of 
these shrouds were torn off from time to time, 
but they were easily replaced with others, till 
Darwin came along and unwound the grave- 
clothes almost to the body of the truth itself 
and frightened some of the sextons clean out of 
the cemetery. Some of those who remained, 
however, after trying in vain to put back the 
clothes which Darwin had taken off, gave up 
the attempt and busied themselves with the 
wrappings which he had left. They presently 
succeeded in making a very respectable 
mummy of their truth again. 

Darwin really left only one shroud on 
religion, and that is the miraculous origin of 
life. Now, some clever fellow will sooner 
or later come along and take off this shroud 
by proving that living organisms have origi- 
ns? 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

nated from the operation of purely natural 
forces on what we are accustomed to regard 
dead matter, and then, at last, the body of 
religious truth will stalk forth with more 
vigor than it ever showed in the past, and 
we shall wonder why we ever feared to let 
it show itself before. 

In my poor opinion it would be just as 
well to become accustomed to this shock 
before it comes. If we do not, a great many 
very good and very pious people, finding the 
last rag of superstition torn from religion, will 
foolishly decide that the truths of religion 
themselves have been destroyed, and will 
turn into the hopeless byways of atheism, 
without taking the trouble to observe that a 
natural divinity may be just as infinite, just 
as eternal, just as divine, and just as satis- 
factory in every way, as a supernatural divin- 
ity J that a natural immortality would be just 
as welcome as a miraculous immortality ; and 
that a natural love (the essence of religion) 
is really a more reasonable thing than a su- 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

pernatural love, which is apt to float so far 
beyond the clouds as to be rather chilly when 
it comes back to earth again. 

Now, if some of those amiable gentlemen 
who compose the theological profession could 
know what I am thinking to-night, some of 
them might be inclined to ignore my fancies 
as the improbable dreams of a mildly delirious 
lunatic. Others might take a more serious 
view of them, and advise a restriction of my 
liberty ; and the rest would probably be frank 
enough to admit that their own faith had been 
looking over the hedge of orthodoxy into the 
heretical field in which my own imagination 
has been stumbling around. For ministers 
are really not bad fellows. They have done 
a vast amount of good in the world, much of 
which has been overlooked on account of 
some of their blunders, — blunders which 
were the result of the universal ignorance of 
mankind, for which no one in particular ap- 
pears to have been responsible. If Cotton 
Mather delivered a few witches over to the 
159 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

Devil, it was, after all. Justice Sewall who 
hanged them. It is therefore unreasonable 
to saddle the whole blame upon the clergy- 
men, — although candor compels the admis- 
sion that Sewall had studied theology before 
he studied law, — and it is not fair to forget 
that clergymen have smoothed the pathway 
of many a poor wretch to the limitless un- 
known and kept the prop of faith under an 
important body of possible truths that could 
in the nature of things have no better support, 
some of which may, in some future age, have 
a foundation of scientific proof built under 
them. 

While they have been doing this, they have 
been the victims of a vast amount of exasper- 
ating prodding by irreverent laymen, which 
prodding they have generally borne remark- 
ably well. 

Now, if one of these long-sufFering clergy- 
men should happen in to-night and say, 
" My dear sir, if you take away supernatural- 
ism you will destroy religion," I should reply, 
i6o 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

" I have not had the honor of taking away 
any of it, but it is nevertheless disappearing 
like frost in a July sun, and religion is not 
being destroyed. 

" Supernaturalism is nothing but the gar- 
ments in which the essential truths of religion 
have been clothed — and disguised. When 
these garments become too old-fashioned to 
be longer tolerated, some one will take 
them off, one by one, and you must not ask 
what they will be replaced with. It may 
not be necessary to replace them at all. 
Truth has a robust constitution, and can go 
about naked without any danger of catching 
cold. 

'' A good many of these garments have 
already been stripped off, and it would be 
wearisome to repeat the names of all those 
intrepid fellows who have done the stripping ; 
but you will admit that the essentials of relig- 
ion have not suffered by the process. Noth- 
ing has suffered, in fact, except the geology, 
astronomy, and biology of the Old Testa- 
" . i6i 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

merit, and the pathology and therapeutics of 
the New. 

" These things are not religion, but by 
clinging as you do to the only rag of super- 
naturalism that is left, you make it appear 
that these things are religion, and thus pave 
an easy road to atheism for those who see 
these things disappearing. 

" Whether we are supernaturalists or not, 
to any one who will open his eyes it looks 
reasonable to believe that there is a divinity 
in the universe, for the meanest man that was 
ever hanged had something good, something 
divine, about him ; and the existence of this 
divinity is rendered no more real by attributing 
it to a supernatural source. 

"That intelligence or something superior 
to intelligence rules the universe seems prob- 
able, for the intelligence of man would not 
enable him to construct a world or a solar 
system or a Milky Way, even if he had the 
materials. It would not enable him to con- 
struct out of the materials at hand a human 
162 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

intelligence, and it does not, even after cen- 
turies of discipline by the divinity of Nature, 
enable him to form any conception of a form 
of activity that may be as much higher than 
man's intelligence as his own intelligence is 
higher than the mechanical movements of a 
watch. He must, forsooth, attribute a mag- 
nified form of his own intelligence to his 
Deity, as if there could be no form of activity 
so high that mere intelligence, however mag- 
nified, may constitute the merest fragment 
of it. 

" Here is the suggestion of divinity enough 
for any reasonable man, and do you really 
pay a very great compliment to this divinity 
when you assume that the existence of any 
divinity is so incredible that we must turn 
our minds topsy-turvy and inside out in 
order to be in a position to believe in it ? 
This you certainly do when you insist that 
the existence of a divinity necessarily implies 
the conversion of nothing into something, a 
long string of miracles, and the reversal of 
163 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

the laws of Nature — which are an expres- 
sion of the divine will — in each and every 
one of the instances of divine inspiration that 
have appeared in the world from the time of 
Gautama Buddha down to Shakespeare. 

" Perhaps you think that I, being a lay- 
man, have no right to have any views on the 
subject of theology ; but as a genial New 
England doctor, named Holmes, once said, I 
have been taking fifty-two lectures a year 
during the greater part of my life, from 
orthodox teachers of theology, and unless my 
instructors have been utterly incompetent, I 
should now be familiar enough with the sub- 
ject to be entitled to an opinion on it. If, 
in view of this long course of instruction, 
you attach enough importance to my opinion 
to ask me how I can prove the existence of 
a natural divinity, I shall admit that I can- 
not do it as I can prove one of Euclid's 
propositions, — if I have not forgotten my 
geometry, — for I have not been instructed 
to look for a natural divinity. But I insist 
164 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

that in the present state of knowledge, the 
existence of such a divinity cannot be dis- 
proved, and that every advance of knowledge 
has rendered it more probable. 

" I ask you if you can say as much for 
your non-natural divinity, the proof of whose 
existence consists, by your own frequent and 
emphatic admissions, in the denial of the per- 
manence of the universe and the uniformity 
of Nature, — both of which are being ren- 
dered more and more undeniable by science 
and philosophy, and really constitute the only 
satisfactory evidence of divinity that we 
have. 

" Can you explain why a derangement of 
Nature in the form of an incredible miracle 
is evidence of a better kind of omnipotence 
than that to the existence of which the ob- 
vious orderliness of Nature testifies ? 

" Do you ask how life got into the world ? 
I do not know. Does supernaturalism ex- 
plain how life got into the world ? It only 
tells us it did get into the world, which is 
'6s 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

more than it can prove ; for we only know 
that life is here, and do not know at all that 
it was not always here. 

" Are we at all certain that the line which 
we have drawn between living things and 
dead things is a valid boundary, and that it 
really separates these two classes of things 
any more than our arbitrary classification of 
vegetables and animals separates them ? 

" Does man really possess any property or 
attribute that is not vaguely shadowed forth 
in those forms of matter which we call dead ? 

" Does man have a definite, complex fig- 
ure ? So does a piece of lime, but its figure 
is less definite and less complex than that of 
man. 

" Does man's body execute definite and 
complex movements ? So does a piece of 
lime, but the movements which it executes 
are less definite and less complex than those 
of a man. 

" Does the substance of a man's body 
undergo changes which are definite and com- 
i66 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

plex ? So does the substance of a piece of 
lime, but the changes which its substance 
undergoes are less definite and less complex. 

" Man has no physical or chemical prop- 
erty that does not exist in some simple and 
indefinite form in the inorganic world. Of 
course, physical and chemical properties are 
not vital, but when we follow them from 
man down through simpler and simpler forms 
of living beings and on into the inorganic 
world, and when we see how those properties 
which are vital lose in definiteness and com- 
plexity in the same gradual way as we de- 
scend from man to the lowest living beings, 
. — are we certain that these vital properties 
really cease to exist where they seem to 
vanish ? 

" Sensibility, motility, assimilation, and re- 
production are the four chief vital properties. 
When we examine them we shall find that 
the definiteness and the complexity of their 
manifestation gradually fade away as we 
descend to lower and lower orders of living 
167 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

beings ; and when we reach the amoeba, 
whose whole body is a single cell, and is all 
brain, all stomach, all legs, and all a repro- 
ductive apparatus, we shall hardly be able to 
realize that the life which this cell has is a 
simple, indefinite manifestation of exactly the 
same kind of life as that which man has ; yet 
there is no difference between the life of a 
man and that of the amoeba, except a differ- 
ence of degree. The assimilation, mentality 
(or sensibility), motility, and reproduction of 
the amoeba are the same vital characteristics 
as those of man. 

" Now, is there a less gap between the 
birth of a child and that of a single cell than 
there is between the birth of the latter and 
that of a crystal of snow ? 

" Is it further from the motility of a single 
cell to the movement of a magnetic needle 
than it is from the violin playing of a Bee- 
thoven to the movement of the cell ? 

" If the turning of a leaf toward the light 
reveals in the leaf a mentality which is merely 
168 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

a vastly remote analogue of the mentality of 
man, do not the chemical affinities of car- 
bon, phosphorus, and oxygen reveal in them 
something that is merely a vastly remote 
analogue of the mentality of the leaf? 

" If the vast difference between man and 
the single cell is a mere difference of degree, 
how do we know that the difference between 
the living cell and a grain of gunpowder is 
one of kind ? 

" And now, if the most daring effort of 
my imagination cannot awaken in your mind 
the faintest suspicion of life in inorganic 
matter, please do not regard your unbelief 
an offence to me, for you will notice that I 
have not said that I myself believe the thing 
to which my questions point." 

Here the Lonely Man smoked thoughtfully 
for a few moments as if he were pondering 
whether to follow out his present train of 
thoughts to their logical conclusion. He 
quickly decided that he had already gone too 
169 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

far to retreat, and that it would be more 
interesting to go on. 

If I should ask a scientific materialist, who 
believes in nothing but matter and motion, 
whether there is the slightest reason to be- 
lieve that there is anything akin to life in 
inorganic matter, he would doubtless say, 
without the least hesitation, that there is not. 
If I should ask him whether there is life in 
the substance of an amoeba, he would say 
that there is, although the substance of the 
amceba's body consists of exactly the same 
elements as those which abound in the in- 
organic world. If I should ask him why 
the matter in the amoeba's body is alive, 
while the same matter in the inorganic world 
is dead, he would say that in the former case 
the matter is organized, while in the latter 
case it is not. 

Thus the only thing that distinguishes 
living matter from dead matter is organiza- 
tion ; yet the organization of the amoeba is 
170 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

not the " state of being furnished with or- 
gans," for the amoeba, being a single cell, has 
no organs. Its organization is nothing but 
definiteness and complexity of structure. 

The more definite and complex the struc- 
ture of any organism is, the higher is the 
type of that organism's life. Thus, the life 
of a fish is vastly higher than that of an 
amceba, for the fish consists of billions of 
cells, each one of which is as complex as the 
amoeba's whole body ; and in the fish these 
cells are differentiated into hundreds of definite 
organs and structures. The life of man is 
the highest type of life that we know, for 
man's organization is more definite and com- 
plex than that of any other known creature. 
His mentality is, therefore, higher than that 
of any other known creature, for mentality 
is one of the vital phenomena, and obeys the 
same law that fixes the plane of the other 
vital phenomena. They are all highest in 
the most highly organized creatures, and 
lowest in the simplest creatures. 
171 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

Now (mused the Lonely Man) a biologist 
would not deny any of these propositions. 
He might wish to word them differently. 
Instead of "definiteness and complexity of 
structure," he might wish to say " definite, 
coherent heterogeneity," but these words 
mean practically the same thing and they 
hurt one's brain. The words which I have 
chosen are bad enough. 

Now, since the plane of an organism's 
mentality is fixed by the definiteness and 
complexity of that organism's structure, we 
should expect beings more highly organized 
than man to have mentality of a higher type 
than man's mentality. If these beings were 
as much more highly organized than man as 
man is more highly organized than an amoeba, 
we should expect their mentality to be as 
much higher than man's as his is higher than 
the faint mentality of a single cell. Again, 
as the appearance of man is wholly different 
from that of an amoeba or a tubercle bacillus, 
we should expect beings vastly superior to 
172 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

man to be vastly different from him in 
appearance. 

Now I begin to see whither my thoughts 
are leading me. The thinking has been 
rather hard, but the result of it will be 
interesting. 

Thus far we have kept to known facts. 
Now I must create in my imagination some 
beings that are as much more highly organ- 
ized than man as man is more highly organ- 
ized than a mushroom. Necessarily, their 
mentality will be as much higher than man's 
as his is higher than the mentality of the 
mushroom. Since I must put these remark- 
able beings somewhere, I will suppose them 
to be in Mars. My scientific materialist 
might decline to make such a supposition, 
for science has, apparently, never been able 
to colonize Mars. This can be done only 
by imagination — which has done it with an 
incredible variety of colonists. Therefore, 
I may put a few colonists there on my own 
account. 

173 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

Now, if these denizens of Mars were as 
much superior to man as I have supposed 
them to be, they would, of course, be as differ- 
ent from man as he is different from a mush- 
room. But they are not there, or if they are, 
we do not know it and cannot find it out ; so 
what is the use of making the supposition ? 

There is this use : the momentary pres- 
ence in Mars of these strange creatures of 
my imagination has enabled me to make a 
comparison that would have been impossible 
without their help; and they cannot vanish 
from their Martial abode without, at least, 
leaving the planet behind. They cannot 
take it away with them ; and what shall be 
said of a being so colossal in its proportions 
and so vast in its complexity that the whole 
planet of Mars is a single atom in its body; 
and Jupiter and the Earth and the other 
planets, other atoms ; and the whole solar 
system, a single molecule; and our whole 
sidereal system with its countless constella- 
tions, a single cell ; and the other stellar 
174 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

systems that can be reached by the telescope, 
other cells ; not to mention the systems and 
systems of systems that the most powerful 
telescope never has reached and never will 
reach, the existence of which the boldest 
astronomer would hesitate to deny ? 

This looks no more like a man than a 
man looks like a mushroom, but who can 
deny that it — the whole universe — is an 
organism ? Who can deny that it is a living 
organism ? Do we know of any other organ- 
ism in which the signs of life are more ap- 
parent ? In what other organism are the 
functions performed with such mathematical 
precision, with such incredible swiftness, and 
on so sublime a scale ? Is it not so much 
more perfectly and highly organized than 
man, and so staggeringly vast in its propor- 
tions and infinite in its complexity, that, on 
our own premises, we must admit that its 
mentality is so much higher than man's that 
the difference between a man and an amoeba 
fades, by contrast, into equality ? 
175 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

If we will not admit it, how shall we 
extricate ourselves from the logical tangle 
into which we have fallen ? And if we can- 
not extricate ourselves, how can we show 
that the part of a living whole is dead ? How 
can the matter of a living universe be dead 
matter ? 

Do I myself believe the conclusion at 
which I have apparently arrived ? (mused the 
Lonely Man). Belief is a large word, and I 
would certainly have no one put to torture 
for not believing this theory, — or fancy, if 
that is a better word, — but it seems more 
plausible each time my thoughts recur to it, 
and it seems, on the one hand, to be invul- 
nerable to the assaults of the materialist, and 
on the other hand, it does not seem to be 
irreverent. How can the materiahst deny 
that mentality, or something analogous to it, 
is a universal attribute of organisms, and how 
can it be more irreverent to assume that the 
infinite material universe is, in a real and 
logical sense, the material aspect of an infinite 
176 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

divinity than it is to make the same assump- 
tion in the mystical phraseology of theology 
as we now do ? 

If the philosopher insists that that through 
which all things exist is unknowable, he 
might do so even with this fancy as a work- 
ing hypothesis ; for who knows, or can know, 
the universe ? But those philosophers who 
have most nearly exhausted the subtleties of 
language to prove that the Absolute is abso- 
lutely unknowable have invariably ended with 
either a tacit or an open admission that we 
do actually know something about it. There- 
fore, it is not absolutely unknowable, and it 
does not seem presumptuous to say that the 
Unknowable suggested by my fancy is a more 
natural, tangible, familiar sort of Unknowable 
than the one that lurks behind the fine-spun 
web of Mr. Mansel's philosophy. 

But the important question is : Could I 
satisfy my heart by loving such a divinity ? 

I could, at least, satisfy my reason, and the 
satisfaction of reason is an important step 
12 177 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

toward satisfying the heart. It would, at all 
events, be more satisfactory to love a divinity 
that has some natural, credible relationship 
to man than one that is wholly beyond and 
outside the infinite natural universe to which 
man belongs. If the love of a natural divin- 
ity would not satisfy the human heart, the 
descent of our affection from such a being to 
mankind would seem more rational and less 
violent than the descent from an impossible 
Deity that has no natural or logical point of 
contact with anything so mundane as man- 
kind ; but I begin to perceive that neither 
the love of the mystical Deity which theology 
offers us nor the love of the Absolute which 
is offered by philosophy can satisfy the heart 
of man. 

Man must love something on his own 
plane of being — something of which he can 
form some conception and with which he 
can feel some sympathy. If my fancy points 
in the direction of the truth, the love of man 
would be, in a real sense, the love of a frag- 

178 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

ment of the universal divinity — as great a 
fragment as the infinitesimal capacity of man 
would enable him to bring within the radius 
of his most expanded love, and several million 
times greater than that which he actually 
does love in any true sense. For how can 
we delude ourselves into believing that that 
is love for which a brother or a sister, a 
husband or a wife, would not care a rap ? 
And what brother or sister or husband or 
wife would care a rap for a love whose chief 
expression is hostile competition ? The ques- 
tion is not whether hostile competition is 
right or necessary, but whether it reveals and 
begets love; and I submit that it does not. 

Do we say that man as he is, is so unlovely 
that we cannot love him, and that we must, 
therefore, idealize and magnify his best traits, 
and then love the resulting magnified ideali- 
zation as a god ? That is, perhaps, what the 
best of us unconsciously do in the name of 
religion ; but it is, on the one hand, irrever- 
ent, for this idealization is not God, and it 
179 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

is, on the other hand, irrational, and leads 
swiftly to a mysticism that leaves us nothing 
to love but a bundle of verbal subtleties and 
contradictions, out of which the most astute 
philosopher can hberate no meaning, and the 
most earnest theologian no warmth. This 
can never satisfy the human heart, and this, 
I fear, is the bulk of what religion gives us 
on this side of the grave. 

Does it offer more ? Aye ; but has it 
given more ? If it has taught man really to 
love his fellow-man, how has he so thoroughly 
unlearned the lesson that he now regards his 
fellow-man his legitimate prey, and fears him 
as his worst enemy, except in the presence 
of a police force or in the shadow of an army ? 
And why is it that those armies which are 
most efficient in butchery are those which 
have originated where the noblest existing 
religion has been longest taught ? 

Religion cannot be destroyed till the uni- 
verse has been destroyed and the divinity of 
the universe has ceased to reveal itself through 
i8o 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

the genius of man, whether it be the genius 
of a Hebrew prophet or of an English poet ; 
but it cannot satisfy human hearts till its 
truths have been in some measure stripped 
of their gauzy mysticism and brought to 
earth. So concrete a thing as a human heart 
must love a thing of flesh and blood, and if 
we cannot love man as he is, and must per- 
force idealize, why may we not idealize the 
imperfections out of the humanity that is, and 
then love that, rather than idealize perfec- 
tions into a humanity that is not, and then 
try to love that ? The real side of human- 
ity might be improved by the process, and 
the ideal side would not have the monopoly 
of our affection which it now appears to 
have. 

This seems to be the goal toward which 
religion, science, philosophy, and politics are 
slowly groping, and in some thousands of 
years the goal may be reached, but it is con- 
ceivable that with our voluntary aid it might 
be reached some thousands of years sooner. 
i8i 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

When it shall have been reached, the heart 
of man may be satisfied. 

If we passively wait for the realization of 
this dream we shall wait long, and neither the 
struggle for bread nor the scramble for gold 
nor the murmuring of prayers will greatly 
alleviate the dreariness of waiting. But let 
us not be disheartened : let us not too hastily 
decide that there is nothing that can in any 
degree satisfy the heart while we wait. There 
are more things than banks and churches in 
the world : there is the justice of the peace, 
forsooth, and he can marry us. 

Here is the promise of a joy so sweet that 
one's whole being thrills with pleasure at the 
thought of it. This promise comes when 
fortune favors us, and gives a rich intensity 
to all our other joys. It comes in times 
of gloom and sadness and gently mitigates 
our sorrow. It hovers on the outskirts of our 
consciousness in loneliness and redeems our 
moods from utter dulness. It bids us per- 
severe when constant disappointment attends 
182 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

our efforts to win wealth or fame. It cheers 
us when the bubble bursts within our hands 
after we have won it, and makes us try again. 
It comes when grim despair has bidden us to 
curse the world and die, and stays our hand 
and lures us on to meet defeat again. 

I know not what joy the hope of being 
loved by one man brings to a woman's heart, 
for my ignorance of her heart is boundless ; 
but the hope of being loved, or the belief 
that one is loved, by some fair woman, is the 
thing that gives the gladness to all the men 
that have glad hearts. This sweet, seductive 
hope is that which lies beneath the tragedy — 
or comedy — of life, and gives a man the 
courage to play his part in it. It is this that 
sends him out to war against his fellows and 
beguiles him into church to pray ; it is this 
that makes the world seem, in spite of all the 
savage cruelty there is within it, a delightful 
place J it is this that makes life seem, in 
spite of all its vapid emptiness, a glorious 
thing. A man may scoff bravely at the love 

183 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

of woman, but in his secret soul he knows 
this is the main thing in his life. 

So, then, let us not become despondent. 
We have the promise of this love. Our 
instinct plants the promise in our hearts and 
will never let it die. We feel it tingling in 
our veins in early youth ; we feel it straining 
at our wills in later years to swerve us from 
the course of life we have mapped out j we 
feel it leaping in our hearts when our super- 
human efforts to achieve a dear success have 
brought the prize within our reach ; we see it 
in the amorous glance of half-veiled eyes and 
in the modest blushes of coy cheeks; it 
whispers to us in the rustle of a silken skirt ; 
it is this that murmurs softly to us in the 
dreamy measures of a waltz, — this promise 
of a woman's love. 

So let us scoff at the universal love of 
human beings for all their fellow-beings. 
Let us call it a sweet, Utopian dream that 
will never be fulfilled, and let us do nothing 
to hasten its advent. Let us love, of course, 
184 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

but let us fix our hot affection on one fellow- 
being of the other sex and put our knife to 
the throats of other fellow-beings to make 
that one happy. Though we may not make 
a flower garden of the world, we may have 
a little garden of our own with one sweet 
rose in it — and a barbed-wire fence around 
it. And if we fear the thorns that often lurk 
beneath the petals of the rose, and therefore 
never have a garden of our own, we may lean 
upon our neighbor's barbed-wire fence and 
inhale the fragrance of his rose. The roses 
seem to like it ; but let us not forget that 
barbs are often quite as sharp as thorns. 

So do not worry about the love of humanity 
in general. Claim the sweet fulfilment of 
the promise which instinct gives you, and 
love a woman. Do not think the promise is 
a mere enticing mockery. What does it 
matter that the pretty schoolmate who, in 
the distant past, blushingly confessed her love 
to you behind the lilac bush, and passed the 
touching little messages of love to you be- 

185 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

tween the pages of her spelling book, and 
sobbed out her assurances of eternal constancy 
to you when at last you went out into the 
world to seek your fortune, — was married 
to another wretch within a year ? She was 
a girl. Love a woman. 

You saw, yourself, that it really did not 
matter, after you had met the sister of your 
friend's wife. When you fell under the spell 
of her brown eyes and black hair and slender 
figure, you perceived that you had never 
really loved before. Her silvery voice gave 
utterance to the first real melody in a woman's 
soul that you had ever heard. Were you 
not thankful then that you had escaped the 
simple little schoolmate ? This was no sen- 
timental little rustic ; this was a splendid 
woman who had had the constant, watchful 
care of fond parents, the accomplishments 
which wealth alone can give one, and was 
worthy of a prince's love. She heard love's 
message for the first time when she heard it 
from your lips. Her glad surprise showed 
i86 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

you how new the message was and how 
sweet. There was no feigning here. The 
joy that glistened in her averted eyes was 
the real joy that cannot be counterfeited. It 
was the kind of joy that tingles through a 
woman's nerves, and quivers in her breath, 
and sets its blushing stamp upon her face and 
neck before the quickest tongue can frame 
a sentence. It was the kind of joy that has 
Nature's guarantee of genuineness, and makes 
a sudden paradise of the world and a poem 
of two lives. Even after all these years you 
will admit that this woman loved you — then, 
and for one blissful month thereafter. 

At first, when things began to change, the 
explanations of her absence when she ex- 
pected you seemed plausible. There was 
the sudden call to a sick grandmother, — she 
was her grandmother's favorite. There was 
her unexpected delay with her sister at the 
missionary society, — her sister really was 
away that evening. There was another un- 
expected delay with her sister's husband, 
187 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

— and then unlucky chance disclosed the 
fact that her sister's husband had spent that 
evening at his office, while your sweetheart 
spent the evening In the park with some one 
else; and then your fond heart grew suspi- 
cious. A rival whom you did not know had 
come along and reaped the harvest you had 
sown. The lips that you had taught to kiss 
kissed his. The soul In which you wakened 
into life the symphony of love now played 
this symphony in his. The breast that you 
had taught to throb with love now throbbed 
with love on his. 

But do not, I pray you, grow despondent. 
This woman had been too long shielded from 
temptation, and when temptation came she 
yielded. Who was it that said, " The vir- 
tue that requires a constant guard is hardly 
worth the sentinel " ? He told the truth. 
Go, seek out a woman who has been thrown, 
without a chaperon, into the fiery furnace of 
temptation which we call the world, and yet 
has stood the test. You will think you find 
i88 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

her, and whether her eyes are of one color or 
another, whether the fair possessor is plump 
and jolly or slender and grave, whether she 
still has the beauty of ripe maturity to win or 
is already regretting the loss of her ancient 
prettiness, — the symphony which she will 
play in your soul and the poetry which she 
will write in your life will be the same, if the 
fair creature can awaken them at all ; and in 
some cases she will play the same symphony 
with only a faint discord here and there, and 
inject the same poetry into the world all 
through one's life, till the gray hairs come 
and the eyes grow dim and one totters into 
one's grave with the pleasing conviction that 
it has been a good thing to live. 

If she can do this for you, what matters 
It that she may have done it for a dozen 
others ? Sly dogs who think they know the 
world will tell you that she has, and that you 
are a fool to love her; but, mark you, you 
are no greater fool than they will be if they 
ever fall in love. He who has never known 
189 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

the bliss of being a fool has never been in 
love. I have been, but though I am not 
so great a fool as he who seeks to regulate 
the conduct of other fools in love, I may- 
advise you to let sleeping dogs lie. Where 
you have no suspicions let no other man 
awaken them. Remember that if it is ever 
true that " nothing is but thinking makes 
it so," it is true in love ; and remember that 
though a woman were as chaste as Diana she 
could not prove her virtue. 

There are some cynics who tell us that the 
love between a man and a woman never 
lasts, but this is false. Sometimes the pretty 
dream is dreamed out to the end without a 
nightmare : the poetry runs smoothly on 
through an enchanted world; the symphony 
plays sweetly on in an enchanted heart till 
the end of life is reached. I know, for I 
have seen ; but, alas, I have not seen this 
very often. Oftener have I had reason to 
suspect that the symphony had died out, and 
the heart-strings had become covered with 
190 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

dust or were being clandestinely played by an 
unseen and forbidden hand. 

So, when one feels that one is coming 
under the influence that has power to awaken 
this music in the soul and write this poetry 
in the world, how shall one know that this is 
the kind of music that will last ? How shall 
one know that the player will not lose her 
cunning or the instrument its tone ? The 
first strains are indistinguishable from the 
kind that does last — and from the kind that 
does not. Shall we say that the love that 
dies was never love ? Ah, we do not say it 
till it dies. We thought it was love, till its 
decay convinced us that it was not. It is a 
timid diagnostician who never makes a diag- 
nosis except at an autopsy. Then, some- 
times, when a surfeited heart has had a long 
rest or a change of surroundings, the old love 
comes to life again and we change our minds 
again and say it was love after all. Here is 
a mystery ; a mystery which, it is true, may 
often be solved by showing that the decay of 
191 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

love was due to some one's stupid selfishness, 
but often it cannot be solved at all. We 
must put it back upon the mental shelf on 
which we keep the other mysteries that have 
to do with woman. 

There are many of these mysteries. Her 
intellect is one of them. That she has an 
intellect there is no longer any doubt, but 
there is still some difference of opinion as to 
the relative capability of her intellect and 
that of her brother. Whatever the solution 
of this question may be, woman's intellect is 
different from man's. At least, it has seemed 
so to me. When I have told her that I have 
had four great-grandfathers, she has almost 
always asked me if my mother married twice. 
When I have assured her that there have 
been no second marriages among my ances- 
tors so far as history records their misdeeds, 
she has looked upon me with suspicion as an 
eccentric person who has chosen a needlessly 
complicated method of getting into the world 
and may cause trouble before getting out of 
192 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

it. When I have told her at noon on Mon- 
day that in ten days I should leave town, she 
has invariably counted the days on her fingers 
and decided that I should go at noon on 
Wednesday of the next week. When I 
have, in the deep humiliation resulting from 
her apparently needless haste to get rid of 
me, assured her that I had not intended to 
go till Thursday, she has counted her pretty 
fingers again, saying, " To-day is one day," 
and found again that she had exactly fingers 
(and thumbs) enough to reach to noon on 
the second following Wednesday. In these 
intellectual encounters I have invariably been 
compelled to retire with a badly damaged 
reputation for arithmetical acumen. 

Then when I have asked her how old I 
was when I was half as old as my brother, 
if, ten years later, my age was two-thirds of 
his, she has innocently asked me how old my 
brother was at that time. When I have 
told her that boys and girls in short nether 
garments are solving such problems as that 
13 193 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

in the schools without knowing how old the 
brother was, she has faintly remembered 
something of the sort in her own school ex- 
perience, but has said that she never did like 
puzzles and does not consider them practical. 
She may even have intimated that age is 
rather too delicate a subject to discuss with 
a lady, anyhow. 

Now, in the mind of a fairly intelligent 
man the statement of the problem immedi- 
ately resolves itself into 

X + 10 = J (2X + lO), 

whence, by the swift compulsion of inexora- 
ble logic, without any aid from teachers or 
any guidance from books, the male mind is 
forced to the conclusion that this important 
period in my life was a good while ago ; 
namely, when I was exactly ten years old. 

The educated male mind can work with 
swift precision in a groove of logic which 
leads by only one possible route to only one 
possible conclusion. It may ascend into 
previously unexplored regions, but it must be 
194 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

pushed by logic up the syllogistic stairway 
from one premise to the next. Where a 
step is out or where there is a parting of the 
ways, it is more likely to go wrong than not. 
It must have the compulsion of necessity or 
the guidance of extreme probability or it will 
go wrong. 

Now, compulsion is exactly what my 
sister's intellect does not like. Give her a 
problem to the solution of which there is no 
clearly defined road — a problem to which 
there are seven thousand possible answers 
only one of which can be correct, and her 
agile mind will balance itself for its flight 
into the unknown, as a meadow lark on the 
fence that separates the beaten road from the 
trackless meadow balances itself first on one 
foot and then on the other, and sings out to 
you, " My nest is in the meadow. You can- 
not see it, but do you think I cannot find it ? 
The grass is tall, and there are no pathways 
through the air, but am I not a meadow 
lark ? " Then, after performing a few gyra- 
195 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

tions before your bewildered eyes and turning 
back to laugh at your dulness, it sweeps 
with unerring precision to its nest. 

While woman's intellect does not abso- 
lutely refuse to work in the logical groove, it 
has seemed to me that it dislikes to do so, pre- 
ferring to solve those problems which must 
be solved as the meadow lark finds its nest ; 
and with her newly liberated intellect she has 
solved full many a problem in the unmapped 
realms of thought while the clumsy intellect 
of man has been looking around for a path. 

Some of the sweetest and truest poetry that 
has ever been written has, according to my dull 
judgment, been written by a woman whose 
name I will not even think, lest I suspect 
myself of indulging in fulsome flattery, which 
I never do. When we see these truths in 
their beautiful habiliments of words we can 
see that they are true, but we could never 
have found them ourselves. 

But are we always certain when this in- 
tellect of our fair sister swoops from the 
196 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

dizzy heights which we cannot attain, into a 
bewildering maze of thought whither we 
cannot follow, that it always really goes any- 
where or finds anything when it gets there ? 
I have read books (the names of which it is 
needless to think) which, to me, were as 
hopelessly incoherent and senseless as the 
jabbering of a man who is recovering from 
the effects of ether ; while to many a woman 
whom I have known there was in each mys- 
tical sentence in these books a perfectly lucid 
meaning. It is comforting to know that to 
some of my sisters the apostles of mysticism 
are as incomprehensible as they are to me; 
but it is discouraging to know that to some 
of my brothers — actual men with whiskers 
— such writers are as intelligible as they are 
to my specially initiated sisters. 

I have sought out my sister — the one 
who understands occult things — and humbly 
craved her assistance in my effort to under- 
stand them. She has tried to reduce the 
subtle meanings of her favorite authors to 
197 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

language of a simplicity commensurate with 
that of the coarse machinery of my dull brain, 
but she has failed. I have at times been in- 
spired with the hope that I should presently 
understand, but just as my exhausted intellect 
has trembled on the threshold of the occult 
world to which she would fain have intro- 
duced me, I have suddenly become conscious 
of — nothing but the figures on the carpet 
and the pictures on the wall and the other 
familiar things in the prosaic world in which 
I Hve. 

Did I say prosaic world ? It will never 
be a prosaic world to me, my dear sister, so 
long as you are in it. It may be that mys- 
tery is an intellectual necessity to man, but 
shall I despair of finding this mystery because 
the occultism of the Orient is a closed book 
to me, because I cannot read Hegel after he 
tells me that being and not being are the 
same, because absent treatment has no effect 
on me, and because the rites of my secret so- 
ciety are cheap humbugs which any school- 
198 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

boy could see through ? Shall I despair of 
finding mystery because all through the allur- 
ing realm of modern geometry — in which 
parallel lines meet at infinity or anywhere 
else one chooses to make them meet, in 
which the three angles of a triangle may be 
either greater or less than two right angles, 
in which space may be round or oval or of 
the shape of a saddle and have as many di- 
mensions as one pleases to give it — my im- 
agination, as it struggles to follow Riemann 
and Helmholtz, is pursued by the dull con- 
viction that an axiom does not require a 
proof and that Euclid's twelfth axiom is cor- 
rect whether it can be proved or not ? 

No, I shall not despair, for so long as 
woman is in the world there will be a mys- 
tery great enough for me, a real mystery 
which lures my baffled understanding to re- 
newed attempts at its solution after each 
defeat. I have studied this mystery in the 
dull routine of daily life ; I have studied it 
in the gayety of the ballroom ; I have studied 
199 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

it in the sacred presence of the other mystery 
of birth; I have studied it in the solemn 
presence of the final mystery of death. It 
has mocked me from the depths of laugh- 
ing eyes ; it has frowned at me from eyes 
that never laugh ; it has leered at me from 
painted faces in the street at night when 
no policeman was in sight; and once in 
such a face I thought it had almost revealed 
itself. 

Something in that face seem.ed to say, 
" The honored wife upon the boulevard and 
I are sisters. We wear man's yoke — I for 
an hour, she for life ; and neither of us 
loves him. Our vanity must first be grati- 
fied, and then we must be fed. My sister 
in the office and the marts of trade has cast 
aside man's yoke and donned his armor, and 
now she hates him while she fights him. 
What would you have, fool ? Do you ex- 
pect to find love in the brothel or the home, 
when there is none in the world ? The 
world is made of homes and brothels. How 
200 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

can there be more in the parts than in the 
whole ? We must he fed, Ha^ ha I We 
must be fed .'^ 

How much of truth there was in what 
that painted face revealed I do not know. 
I cannot think it was the whole truth. I 
have seen homes in which the love was real 
and undisguised, and sometimes my fancy- 
paints a world in which it might be so in 
every case, but it is not the world I find 
about me j and so, to-night, I do not know 
how much of satisfaction the heart of man 
may find in woman's love. 

And the heart of woman ? How shall it 
be satisfied ? Ah, her heart is the most in- 
scrutable part of the whole enigma. I am 
not certain that, in this present world, it can 
be satisfied at all. 

Of late years she has got into the habit 
of thinking, or appearing to think, that the 
scramble at the pie counter is the most satis- 
fying thing in life, and you will find her 
there in numbers that are continually increas- 

20I 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

ing. You will find her competing as merrily 
with her brothers as they compete with each 
other. You will find the struggle none the 
less fierce because of her presence. You will 
find her paying the same price in work for a 
smaller piece of pie than her brother is will- 
ing to take. You will find her clamoring 
for more places at the world's pie counter, 
and you will find her getting them. You 
will find barriers going down, under protest 
at first and without protest at last, for the 
struggle for pie presently leaves no breath for 
protest. 

Everywhere gentle woman, who was once 
the subject of painters, the theme of poets, 
the mother of children, the inspiration of 
men, — who was once the one lovely feature 
of a world otherwise brutalized by the strug- 
gle of man against man, — is elbowing her 
way into the struggling crowd, still further to 
intensify and embitter the strife and make 
this loveless world less lovely than it was 
before. 

202 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

It may be that this is the final act in a 
tragedy of the race. God forbid that the 
curtain should ever go up on anything worse. 
It may be that this is the means whereby 
Nature will finally jolt the dull faculties of 
man into some realization of the essential 
brutality of the whole ghastly system of hos- 
tile competition. For if we shall know the 
millennium by the token of love, by that 
token we know that it does not lie in the 
direction of such competition. 

Has such competition been the means by 
which organic life has reached its present 
high plane in man ? Has this murderous 
struggle for existence brought about that nat- 
ural selection whereby man has been evolved 
from the lowest living organisms ? 

I grant that it has, but when I look back 
over the devastated pathway by which man 
has reached his present high plane of being, 
I stand aghast at the spilled blood and broken 
skulls that strew the way. I am appalled at 
the countless billions that have gone down in 
203 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

that struggle, and I am inclined to think 
that the bloody price of progress has now 
been fully paid. 

Must the fittest to survive be for ever the 
one that has the sharpest tooth and strongest 
jaw ? Shall fitness to survive be for ever 
measured by the yardstick of selfishness ? 

It may be true among brutes that selfish- 
ness is the chief condition that determines 
progress ; but man has emerged from the 
state of the beast, and has a lofty intellect 
by means of which he measures worlds and 
compares infinities. This intellect, being a 
product of Nature, is a part of Nature, and 
shall it not enter into the conditions of nat- 
ural selection and so modify that process that 
fitness to survive may hereafter be measured 
in units of usefulness instead of units of self- 
ishness ? 

I think it may, for it is unbelievable that 
superiority of skill in the practice of selfish- 
ness is the only kind of superiority that will 
ever insure survival ; and yet I know that, in 
204 



THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION 

the past, the loftiest superiority of other kinds 
has paid the price of death for the privilege 
of advancing the race. 

But selfishness, as a factor in evolution, is 
progressing sv^aftly to its limit, if, indeed, it 
has not already begun its own destruction. 
When selfishness raises the hand of savage 
against savage and the fang of beast against 
beast, it may cause the crudest hand and the 
most venomous tooth to survive and propa- 
gate its kind; but w^hen selfishness squats 
like an imp on the throne on vi^hich Cupid 
once reigned, the end is in sight. The self- 
ishness which embitters woman against man, 
and man against woman, cannot propagate 
its kind save by example. It cannot beget 
its kind in flesh and blood. 

The competitive warfare that has raised 
man to his present high plane has grown so 
familiar that he thinks it is needful and 
always will be. It has sharpened men's wits 
and brought forth great inventions ; it has 
built up great fortunes and cities ; it has 
205 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

circled the globe with copper and steel ; it 
has heated and lighted our houses with steam 
and electricity; it has brought to our break- 
fast tables the news of what has been done 
in the world overnight. 

Will it enable us to amass still greater 
fortunes, and build still greater (and dirtier) 
cities, and talk still further over a wire or 
across oceans without any wire, and travel in 
still greater luxury to Hongkong or Peking ? 
Will it make our newspapers still greater 
and more widely read, and our books better 
bound, and our bread better baked, and our 
beer better brewed ? 

Aye, it will ; and so would a kind of com- 
petition that would impel us primarily to seek 
the advancement of the race, and seek our 
own advancement only so far as we can 
advance without injury to our fellows. But 
if we continue to advance by the hostile 
method, what shall we presently be able to 
buy with our fortunes that we shall care to 
have ? What shall we be able to say over a 
206 



THE SEARCH FOR Sx\TISFACTION 

telephone wire that will make us or any one 
else any better or happier ? What shall we 
do in Hongkong or Peking when we get 
there that would not better be left undone ? 
Who will care to season his breakfast with the 
news of the night when he must tremblingly 
read the whole paper to see if his own name 
has been blasted at last, or worse blasted than 
it was before ? Who will care to read edi- 
torials, however learned, when one knows that 
the writer would have written the opposite 
for one cent more a yard, and would to- 
morrow for one cent less if he should lose 
his present job ? Who will care for better 
bound books, when the world grows so selfish 
that a book with a truth in it could not be 
sold ? Who will care for better baked bread 
or better brewed beer, when one knows the 
whole world could see one choke on one's 
bread or one's beer and not care a rap ? 

Inventions may facilitate useful endeavor, 
but they do not compel it ; and the only 
thing that can compel it is something in the 
207 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

heart which hostile competition will never 
put there, though it build railroads from Cape 
Town to New Zealand, or air ships that will 
travel from New York to Mars. 

Then, when woman puts on her armor to 
take part in the strife that builds fortunes and 
employs all sorts of inventions, is she sure she 
is helping the race toward its goal ? Is she 
sure that the masculine methods which she 
seems proud to practise have not ceased to 
be fit to be practised, even by men ? 

And yet I would not chide her. At least, 
I would not chide her sex alone for the co- 
lossal selfishness that holds both sexes in its 
grasp. It forces her into her present life. 
It rules the world ; the world whose gold 
does not enrich it, whose prayers do not 
sanctify it ; the world in which the justice 
of the peace too often fails to make us happy 
when he marries us ; for truly, there are 
more things than banks and churches in this 
world : there is also the divorce court. 



208 




THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 



AS the Lonely Man still sits musing be- 
fore his fire, he cannot repress a smile 
at what appears to be the capriciousness and 
obstinacy of his thoughts. They select their 
own subject, apparently in the most hap- 
hazard fashion, without obtaining his consent, 
and dwell upon that subject as long as they 
Hke. When they wander off toward any 
subject, whether it is an old language or a 
new woman, they become so engrossed in it 
that they do not pay as much attention as 
one might think they should pay to the other 
well-dressed and good-looking thoughts which 
14 209 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

they find walking around the subject and 
bowing to each other. 

Sometimes they jostle these other thoughts 
and tread on their toes. They do not mean 
to be rude. They merely want to view the 
subject, and, as they seem to have no fear of 
being trodden upon themselves, they do not 
try to keep off the toes of other thoughts. 

The Lonely Man has tried to dress his 
thoughts in clothes of the most fashionable 
cut, and part their hair in the middle, and 
otherwise make them look like nice, conven- 
tional thoughts. Then, when they have 
been properly groomed and correctly dressed, 
he has sent them forth to any subject you 
please to mention, looking just like any other 
respectable, well-bred thoughts ; and they 
have come back without a rag on their per- 
sons, revealing their paternity in every limb 
and gesture. 

This seems all wrong. It would save so 
much trouble if one's thoughts would observe 
the conventionalities and make themselves 

210 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

look exactly like the thoughts of every one 
else in the crowd, and never disarrange their 
toilets by tussHng with anything like a truth. 
One would get the reputation of being a very 
nice man indeed if one's thoughts would only 
do that. 

One has but to train one's thoughts prop- 
erly, dress them properly, and tell them to be 
good thoughts and take off their hats to all 
other thoughts, and close their eyes when 
they are in danger of seeing anything that 
might alter their appearance. Then they 
will come home looking just as they looked 
when they sallied forth. Only they will not 
if one does any thinking ; and all those who 
have tried the experiment know it. 

The only way to make people think alike 
is to make them think the truth. When we 
send our thoughts ofF to the multiplication 
table and things of that class, they have no 
difficulty in maintaining their resemblance to 
the thoughts of other people j but, as few of 
the subjects which engage our attention belong 

211 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

to this class, our thoughts will certainly have 
their toilets disarranged if they stray very far. 
Their straying, hovi^ever, may enlarge the 
boundaries of knowledge and of unanimous 
thinking. 

The Lonely Man's thoughts were now 
straying in the direction of the pain and 
other forms of evil in the world. Of course, 
he was not certain that he knew how evil 
got into the world, but he was pretty cer- 
tain that it would be a good thing to aban- 
don some of the current theories on that 
subject. 

The theories of which he was thinking 
start out with foundations of cobwebs, which 
support formidable-looking castles of air crys- 
tallized into words, and they reach the con- 
clusion that " the principle of the universe is 
radically perverse and cannot be amended." 
The architects of these gloomy castles inva- 
riably keep on living, which is the strongest 
argument they employ, but it spoils their 
castles. 

212 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

It is possible to build anything of air 
(thought the Lonely Man) if one use enough 
of it and expend industry enough in convert- 
ing it into words ; and it is a singular fact 
that the most terrifying and depressing things 
in the world are constructed of air and cob- 
webs, or still more highly rarefied substances. 

Even the old-fashioned Devil — the one 
on whom Luther wasted his ink — was so 
airy that the ink bottle went clear through 
him and broke on the wall and left a spot 
which the credulous tourist may see yet. 

A personal Devil was a sufficient explana- 
tion of evil only for simple minds. It would 
not do for the philosophers of the early part 
of the last century ; so they built pretty little 
castles of gloom of their own in Germany, 
Italy, and other places. 

The explanations of science were equally 
inadequate for these philosophers ; so they 
tried to construct their castles of something 
more real than the realities of science — and 
built them of air and cobwebs. 
213 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

There was Schopenhauer, who built a 
wonderful castle of gloom at Dresden and 
called it Pessimism. It is built very largely 
of air, but it deserves to endure on account of 
its bold workmanship and some of the beau- 
tiful truths that are imbedded in its walls. 
They are more substantial than air, and must 
have been dragged in unwittingly, for they 
have not the color of pessimism. Some of 
the frowning parapets might have been made 
equally gloomy if they had been constructed 
of the realities of science, but the dismal 
black of the main walls is seen to be a mere 
pigment of words, which can be scraped off. 
We are the less inclined to forgive the use of 
so black a paint when we find that the archi- 
tect himself, after advocating utter poverty 
as a means of alleviating the miseries of life, 
and death as a means of ending them, angrily 
accuses his innocent sister when he loses a 
part of his own fortune (which he afterwards 
recovers to the last pfennig.^ with interest), 
and flees to Frankfort to escape the cholera. 
214 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

Then, there was poor LeopardI in Italy — 
deformed, half blind, wholly deaf, sleepless, 
racked with pain, with no companions, little 
money, and a bright mind. How he loved his 
castles of gloom, and how he loved to build 
them ! Every insubstantial brick in their 
walls seems to have been laid with a caress. 
They are built with the skill of a consummate 
literary artist, but they are built wholly of 
crystallized air. The architect thought he was 
portraying the miseries of the world, when he 
was but craving a little sympathy for his own. 
We find him luxuriating in the abysmal mel- 
ancholy of his awful castles, holding out to 
us pessimism in all its naked terrors, " dally- 
ing lovingly with the idea of death" — and 
dreading the cholera. The quick death of 
cholera seems to have been too easy for 
any of the thorough-going pessimists. They 
were too eager to enjoy the miseries of life 
to die of cholera. 

Then, there was my Russian friend who 
lived in a German pension. He spoke five 
215 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

languages (I never knew a Russian who spoke 
fewer than five languages), and he spoke 
pessimism in them all. When he spoke, the 
other guests of the pension were silent. The 
other guests were usually silent. 

No Fruhstiick could he eat without scold- 
ing the Stubenmadchen about his Stiefel or 
something else. No Abendbrod could he eat 
without depicting — in five languages — the 
vanities and miseries of Hfe. These were 
the only two meals he ever ate, for he never 
got up till noon. 

He was thoroughly convinced that alles 
Leben ist Leiden. But did he drink carbolic 
acid and die ? Ah, noj not he. He had no 
fear, as Hamlet had, of that "something after 
death " which 

** Puzzles the will 
And makes us rather bear those ills we have 
Than fly to others that we know not of." 

For him, there was no possibility of pain 

beyond the grave ; but when one lives in a 

216 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

castle of pessimism, one does not die. One 
has an artistic temperament, — whatever that 
may be, — and one lives to enjoy the archi- 
tectural beauty of one's imponderable castle. 
One has a nice little income, and nothing to 
do — and one does it. One feeds one's self 
well. There is such keen delight in the 
misery of eating ! When one is full of food 
and beer, and the smile of contented misery 
breaks over one's plump countenance, one 
retires a short distance from the table and 
snuggles into the dismal coziness of the sofa. 
Then one smokes a cigarette while one dis- 
courses on the sweet bitterness of existence, 
and shows that life is a burden of pain, and 
the world a vale of tears. Then one goes to 
the opera, and pays the equivalent of two 
dollars for the privilege of weeping at the 
imaginary death of an unreal hero. The real 
world is so cruel that it will not even give 
one all the misery one requires ; so one weeps 
at a tragedy on a stage, and reads Byron and 
Von Hartmann and the rest. 
217 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

Away back in the winding labyrinths of 
one's soul one cherishes Something for which 
one lives. It is so defined that it shall escape 
the definition of happiness. It is not happi- 
ness ; it is something better than happiness. 
One never reveals this Something, but one 
keeps it and hugs it in one's soul, while one 
points out to others the wretchedness of life 
and the futility of all endeavor. Why may 
one not destroy all the pleasure and happiness 
in the world ? One still has the Something. 
One does not destroy that; and one lives to 
enjoy it. No one else knows one has it; 
therein consists its principal charm. So one 
paints one's castle of gloom as black as one 
likes, and makes its corridors as dark, and its 
chimneys as cavernous, and its cellars as nearly 
bottomless, as it is possible to make them. It 
frightens the beholders deliciously, and air is 
cheap ; but one hugs the Something all the 
while, and is hap — - no, not happy, for there is 
no adjective in any language corresponding to 
this Something. If one has comfort, one is 
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THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

comfortable; if one has happiness, one is 
happy. But if one has Something, what 
is one ? There is no adjective in any lan- 
guage to tell what one is ; and thus the secret 
is the more easily kept. 

We all have this Something, some of us 
without knowing it. It is more precious to 
us than happiness, and there is apparently 
nothing that can destroy it. In its inde- 
structibility one seems to acquire a sort of 
perpetuity one's self; and thus, in an incom- 
prehensible sense, it seems that one will live 
to possess this Something after one has, in 
every comprehensible sense, ceased to exist at 
all. It sometimes makes one willing to live 
a life of actual pain, and work without any 
hope of reward in this world or any other, 
and then undergo what one believes to be 
annihilation. It is this that impels an un- 
believer in immortality to die in what he 
believes to be a worthy cause. In doing this 
one does not get happiness ; one gets Some- 
thing, and seems to acquire an eternal claim 
219 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

upon it. It is this that one gets in the 
recollection of past pains and dangers ; it is 
this that one gets in all the griefs and miseries 
with which one delights one's self. 

When one tries to bring forth to the light 
of day this Something it eludes one. One 
cannot grasp it firmly, just as one cannot 
firmly grasp the ultimate parts into which a 
quantity of matter or a portion of space is 
divisible. If there are ultimate atoms which 
cannot be physically divided, they can, at 
least, be ideally bisected by an imaginary 
plane, and each half may be bisected, and 
the process may be indefinitely continued. 
The ultimate division is either absolutely 
nothing, or it is of infinitesimal volume. If 
it is absolutely nothing, an aggregation of ab- 
solute nothings constitutes something; which 
is absurd and logically impossible. If it is, on 
the other hand, of infinitesimal volume or of 
any volume whatever, and cannot be even 
ideally divided, it does not consist of two halves 
or four quarters -, for to say that it does consist 

220 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

of two halves or four quarters is ideally to di- 
vide it; and, however small it may be, if it 
does not consist of two halves or four quarters, 
it is utterly incomprehensible. To escape a 
logical absurdity, we are obliged to accept an 
actual incomprehensibility. It is so with 
this Something in one's mind. It is incom- 
prehensible, but it is there. 

This Something is entirely satisfactory in 
its own realm, but it does not fill one's soul. 
It leaves some room for happiness. Some 
people would rather have happiness than 
Something, anyhow. One must be a philos- 
opher to prefer Something to happiness, and 
we are not all philosophers. Therefore we 
look around in the world for a comprehen- 
sible kind of happiness, and we find that pain 
is, apparently, considerably in excess of that 
kind of happiness which we can clearly de- 
fine and bring squarely before the mind. It 
seems wholly unnecessary to build gloomy 
castles of air, or to waste our tears on the 
griefs of imaginary heroes. We can find 

221 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

plenty of good substantial pain in the world 
without looking for artificial grief in the 
product of any one's imagination. 

Then optimism comes with its bright hues 
and its cheerful voice, and gives us a simple 
recipe for either annihilating pain or embel- 
lishing it into a thing of beauty. Pain is to 
be annihilated by denying its existence; 
when its existence cannot be denied, it is to 
be beautified by the exercise of hope. 

The recipe is so simple that the simplest 
soul can use it. One divides one's pains 
into two classes — the less obvious and the 
more obvious. One denies the existence of 
the former, and, presto ! they are gone. One 
looks at the others through the medium of 
hope and sees the bright colors of the rain- 
bow playing about them. Pain, clothed with 
the iridescence of optimism, becomes a thing 
of usefulness in this world and the paltry 
price of endless joy in the next. 

Now, such is the nature of pain that to 
ignore it is to dull its edge; to forget it is 

222 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

to destroy it. It exists only in conscious- 
ness, and when there is no consciousness of 
it, there can be no pain. In addition to this, 
pain is the most instructive thing in the 
world. So far optimism is right. 

But one cannot destroy a doorpost by 
denying its existence, nor can one make 
scarlet fever less contagious by denying that 
it is contagious at all. The existence of 
these things is not confined to consciousness, 
and they cannot be destroyed by being for- 
gotten. If a person ignores these things, he 
does so at his peril, for the doorpost still ex- 
ists and is still hard, and scarlet fever is still 
contagious and still dangerous. 

If there were no grounds for hoping that 
pain may ultimately be exterminated, a doc- 
trine which teaches us to ignore and forget 
it would be invaluable, for such a doctrine 
would make an otherwise intolerable exist- 
ence tolerable ; but where there is reason to 
believe that most of the pain in the world 
could be avoided and might be relieved, 
223 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

such a doctrine is more depressing than 
pessimism. 

1 see in my fancy an optimist. Though I 
see her only in fancy, I have often seen her 
in the flesh, and once I knew her welL 
What matters it if, as I see her now, she 
may be the composite product of my recol- 
lections of several different persons ? I do 
not say that she is, but what matters it ? To 
me she is one, and her personality is always 
the same. I see her now as I have seen her 
a thousand times before. She is a fair young 
girl who has just crossed the threshold of 
womanhood, and is beautiful with the deli- 
cate beauty of a half-blown rose — the beauty 
that is untainted with knowledge and untar- 
nished by contact with the world. 

In the innocence of her sixteen years she 
believes that this is the best of possible 
worlds; that men and women are generally 
unselfish and just ; that ability always suc- 
ceeds, and merit is always recognized and 
rewarded ; that what little pain there is in 
224 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

the world is wisely ordained by a beneficent 
Providence, and that it will be amply recom- 
pensed in a future life. Poor girl, as to the 
last clause of her belief, I trust she is right. 
As to the others, her faith is the pathetic faith 
of those in whom there is no guile. 

To her the only real pain in the world is 
the pain which others suffer ; and no hand is 
more willing to relieve such pain than is her 
own; and no one's cheerful courage does 
more to make such pain a pleasure to its 
victim. 

She lives on a farm, where there are time 
and quiet for thinking, and large subjects for 
thought ; but to her gentle soul there is 
something irreverent in thought, and some- 
thing impious in inquiry. So she does not 
think of the meaning of the life which she 
sees all about her ; nor of the lore of the 
rocks, which reaches back into the remotest 
past J nor of the vastness of infinity, in 
whose depths the stars twinkle at night ; but 
of the Father who is among and above the 
15 225 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

stars, and on earth and everywhere; who 
might have made it all otherwise, but who 
made it all as it is for the love he bore 
mankind. 

She sees the beauty of beneficent caprice ; 
not the beauty of universal order, nor the 
grimness of an eternal necessity, running 
through the universe, — a necessity to which 
we may — nay, must — learn to adjust our- 
selves if we would be truly happy. 

To her the Father decrees the sprouting 
of every little blade of grass, the coming of 
every storm, and the course of every planet 
and star. He does it all for the good of man. 
He can alter it all, and will, at the entreaty 
of one fair girl who kneels in her nightdress at 
her window and pleads in her gentle voice for 
something to satisfy the yearning in her heart, 
which she, in her innocence, thinks is a yearn- 
ing for the Father himself. Perhaps it is. 

Old Mother Nature hears the prayer, and 
chuckles. She has made the prayer herself. 
She has put the same prayer — less eloquent, 
226 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

perhaps, but the same prayer — in the heart 
of every bird that mates in the Spring, and 
in the heart of every butterfly whose gaudy 
wings reveal its presence and its eagerness 
to find a mate. 

There are waste places in the world, un- 
peopled by sentient beings. There is room 
in the water, in the air, and on the land for 
more living beings and for higher ones. 
Then, men and women die in the course of 
time, and their places must be filled, for the 
game which Nature is playing with the race 
is not yet played out. 

So she puts a yearning in the fair optimist's 
heart, and the yearning finds expression in 
the prayer, and presently is satisfied ; for 
a man comes into the optimist's life, a man 
who is to her a paragon of all the masculine 
perfections. And now, when the optimist 
prays, it is to thank the Father for his infinite 
goodness to her. 

There is reason for her gratitude: her 
optimism has been justified. The man who 
227 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

has come into her life is entirely human, 
but he is not of the common herd of men. 
His life has been as spotless as her own 
(incredible but true), and he loves his pretty 
little optimist with the singleness of heart 
and the constancy which such a girl de- 
serves. Such deep sincerity as theirs, such 
lofty courage, and such intense happiness 
would take the edge from any testy hermit's 
cynicism. 

So the years pass swiftly, and when the 
little optimist has been married for two years 
and is living in a city home, she is still 
happy, still trustful, still deeply in love with 
her husband and with life, and she is more 
optimistic than ever. If she could hear the 
sacrilegious questions of the unsanctified, she 
would shudder and close her ears to them. 
She would not be able to see how any good 
man could question the justice and benefi- 
cence of the existing order of things. It is 
all so simple to her : God is the author of 
all ; therefore, whatever is, is right, and what 
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THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

does not seem to be right is a divine mystery 
which it were presumptuous to investigate. 

And pray, why should she disturb her 
peace with vain questionings ? Her husband 
loves her as he loves his life. He is a keen 
man of affairs, whom the world respects and 
admires ; his coffers are filled with gold ; 
the pride of success is written large on his 
handsome face; and his love for her is 
evidenced by all his acts. She is beautiful 
and rich; her friends are legion and her 
influence is wide; and her heart is so full 
of happiness that she kneels every night at 
her bedside to thank the Father up among 
the stars for his goodness to her and for the 
beautiful world; and she asks him to give 
to others the same unquestioning faith that 
has brought so much joy to her. 

Then one day her husband comes home 
in the middle of the afternoon. He is not 
quite well; he thinks he has caught cold. 

Poor maligned cold ! Is there any ill that 
affects humanity for which you have not been 
229 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

blamed ? Did any dirty cut ever inflame 
and destroy a limb or a life but you were 
convicted and the guilty microbes acquitted ? 

Her husband has a strong will and thinks 
he does not need a doctor, and she, in her 
optimism, believes him ; but an expression 
of startled incredulity blends with her re- 
assuring smile as her husband's pain grows 
worse and his groans more pitiful. 

She smiles still, but there is a big tear on 
each cheek as she asks the doctor when he 
does come if her husband will be sick all 
night, and the brave little smile goes out in 
a pathetic little sob. She has no doubt or 
fear, but it grieves her to see her husband 
suffer so. She hardly knows what the doctor 
is saying when he explains that the illness 
is dangerous ; but he knows, and he knows 
that if he had been called a day sooner 
there would have been a slight possibility of 
saving the patient by an operation, and that 
there is no such possibility now. 

So she prays to the good Father up among 
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THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

the stars to give back the dear life and the 
strong arm and the loving heart that He gave 
her before ; implores Him vi^ith piteous sobs 
to remember that her life is intertwined with 
her husband's by a thousand tender ties ; be- 
seeches Him to take all else from her if He 
will only leave her husband — just as thou- 
sands of others have prayed who have prayed 
in vain. She is sleepless in her eagerness to 
help in the relief of the terrible pain, and she 
thinks her heart will surely break as she sees 
the deathly pallor deepen and feels the dying 
limbs grow more like ice, and knows at last 
that there is no hope. 

Though the malady runs its fatal course 
in three or four days, these three or four days 
are to the optimist as three or four years, 
and no man knows how long they are to the 
dying patient, for his mind remains clear till 
the shuddering body lies at last at the very 
point of death. 

When he dies, there is for a time an end 
of optimism. All that made the world a 
231 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

pleasant place is gone out of it. It is now 
impossible to see the beauty of life or the 
goodness of God. There is nothing left in 
the world but a hopeless loneliness, which 
seems to weigh like a millstone on one's 
heart and to grow heavier hour by hour, and 
more unutterably sad as every familiar object 
in the house recalls with silent pathos the 
happy incidents of the past. There is now 
no apparent irreverence in asking, Why ? 
Why has so good a man and so loving a 
husband been cut down in the full vigor of 
youth ? Why has he been killed by slow 
torture that would have been worse than that 
inflicted by the cruelest savages if it had not 
been in some measure relieved by the doctor's 
efforts ? Why has her heart been broken 
and every tender, clinging fibre of her being 
trodden upon as with a heel of iron .? 

She will not ask, but in the endless night, 
as she paces the floor alone with her grief, 
the elfish questions hover about in the dark- 
ness, like messengers from Hell, and try to 
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THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

creep deep into her soul. When her gray- 
face looks out at the dawn, the questions are 
still there, and a wicked voice which she 
knows is not her own seems to say in almost 
audible tones, " There is no God ! There is 
no God ! " 

Again she prays, and now she prays with 
the trembling desperation of one who would 
escape complete despair. It is not for hap- 
piness that she prays, nor for life, nor death, 
but for one little fragment of the crumbling 
raft of faith that will keep her from sinking 
in the black flood of despair that is rising 
about her. So she struggles against despair 
till exhaustion overcomes her ; and the strug- 
gle is many times repeated. 

But at last merciful time dulls the sharp 
edge of her grief. She does not despair, and 
her faith and her optimism return. She does 
not understand it, but she knows it was for 
the best, and the Father is still a loving 
Father who does all things for our good. 
So she takes up her broken life again, and 
233 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

fills it with a factitious happiness, and spends 
much time in prayer. 

A few years flit by, and as she realizes that 
she is still young, still beautiful, and still rich, 
her optimism begins again to paint the dull old 
world in something like its former cheerful 
hues. 

Then one morning a letter arrives from 
her agent, informing her that her fortune 
has been lost. It has, in fact, been stolen — 
though not in violation of the law. A skilful 
thief does not violate the law. Those bur- 
glars who crack safes and forge names are 
dull souls who cannot appreciate the refine- 
ments of modern robbery. 

The optimist does not believe there has 
been any dishonesty, or that it would be 
possible for a thief to be accounted a respec- 
table citizen ; but she realizes that in her 
husband's death she has lost not only the 
love of his loyal heart, but the protection of 
his master mind ; and grief amid the lux- 
urious surroundings of wealth is one thing, 
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THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

while grief with the lean wolf of poverty 
sniffing at the door is quite another. 

But to her optimistic mind this seems a 
trifling loss. It was only when her heart 
was broken that her optimism failed her. 
Already she sees the goodness of God in 
taking away her fortune. It was to stimu- 
late her to do something good and great in 
his service. She will become a nurse, and 
by her faithfulness and devotion to her work 
she will rise to the highest fame, and the 
world will speak her name with reverence, as 
it speaks the name of Florence Nightingale. 

She obtains the necessary credentials and 
enters a training school. She is sure that in 
this unselfish work she will have the help of 
God and the high appreciation of mankind, 
and her optimism paints a roseate picture of 
the future. 

But it is all different from what she thought 

it would be. No one seems to appreciate 

her loftiness of purpose in coming here, and 

there is less opportunity of doing good than 

235 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

she thought there would be. For three 
months she does nothing but make beds and 
do other work which an ordinarily intelligent 
servant should be able to do ; and she pres- 
ently learns that this is to be done, not to 
please God nor to pave her way to fame, 
but to escape the censure of the head nurse. 

Her head nurse is a blond girl whose eyes 
slant downwards from the top of her nose. 
She is not popular with the probationers nor 
with the nurses in general, but she does not 
seem to care. She is in high favor with the 
superintendent of the training school. 

So the optimist works like a galley slave 
in wards redolent of iodoform, and will earn 
the right to be a head nurse, by and by, her- 
self. She has a pleasant smile for every one ; 
and the months go by, and she does not 
become a head nurse. 

The blond girl is already an assistant super- 
intendent — but she is not an optimist. It 
might not be just to say that the blond girl 
has obtained her promotion through anything 
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THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

like toadyism or flattery, for she is fully com- 
petent to fill her new position. But there 
are other equally competent nurses who have 
not been promoted. And the blond girl 
does understand the use of that seductive 
flattery which does its work and leaves no 
trace ; and she never wastes it on her subor- 
dinates. It is almost noticeable that she re- 
serves it for members of the directory or of 
the hospital staff, or for the superintendent. 

The optimist sees no connection between 
all this and the blond girl's promotion. Merit 
is the only ground of promotion here, as else- 
where. So she works harder than ever and 
is startled when she looks in her mirror and 
sees that her beautiful complexion is gone 
and that she is becoming bent and haggard. 

It does not matter, for fame is just beyond. 
She will deserve promotion, and then it will 
come ; and she already sees her portrait among 
those of others of the world's benefactors. 

One morning she is transferred to the 
operating room. She has never witnessed an 
237 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

operation before, and to her there is a grue- 
some novelty about the steam from the ster- 
ih'zer, the fumes of ether and carbolic acid, 
the ghastly face of the unconscious patient, 
the grotesque white costumes of the surgeon 
and his assistants, and the glass cases full 
of glittering and cruel-looking instruments. 
Her pulse quickens, and her heart beats with 
audible violence within her emaciated breast. 

She has nothing to do but to hold a basin 
of sponges where the second assistant can 
reach them with his blood-stained left hand. 

But the optimist cannot help looking at 
the face and listening to the spluttering 
breathing, although it is not necessary for 
her to do this. Of course she knows the 
operation will save the patient's life, and the 
patient does not feel it, and it is a noble 
work; and she has nothing to do but to 
hold the basin for the blood-stained hand — 
nothing to do but that. 

The surgeon is looking at her with a cyni- 
cal smile. He says nothing, and presently 
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THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

proceeds with the operation, while the smile 
hovers around the corners of his mouth. It 
is so very funny that the new nurse should 
look so ghastly pale. 

The optimist bites her under lip to keep 
from fainting, but her hand trembles so vio- 
lently that the edge of the basin strikes the 
second assistant's hand when it comes out for 
another sponge, and he turns his head slightly 
to look at her, and then he smiles. It Is very 
funny indeed. 

If she could only keep the room from 
swaying, she could stand firmly, but it rocks 
so violently, and the steam is so suffocating, 
and the blood on the hand Is so red — so red 
— so very red — that she faints, and the 
second assistant catches her just In time to 
prevent her from knocking her head against 
the tiled floor. Then she is carried out ; the 
second assistant disinfects his hands, and the 
operation goes silently on. 

When she revives, the superintendent is 
sitting beside her with the look of ineffable 
239 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

superiority which only this superintendent 
knows how to wear. One of the superin- 
tendent's eyebrows is, by nature, a little 
higher than the other. When she wishes to 
feel and seem especially superior, it goes a 
little higher still. Just now it is at its highest 
point. 

The superintendent was born with a heart, 
but finding a heart both useless and dangerous 
in the struggle for advancement, she has 
allowed it to atrophy, and now, instead of a 
heart, she has a pair of all-seeing eyes, with 
a perennially elevated brow over the left one. 
The superintendent has noticed of late that 
the optimist is hardly fitted for her work. 
The superintendent has had unfavorable re- 
ports from the optimist through the blond 
girl with the slanting eyes. The superin- 
tendent thinks, in short, that it will be best 
for the institution, as well as for the optimist 
— especially for the optimist — to cancel the 
contract, release the optimist from any further 
obligations, and permit her to return to her 
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THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

home, although she knows the girl no longer 
has a home. 

The superintendent is not an optimist her- 
self. She knows that envious eyes are looking 
in vain for some flaw in her work, and that if 
she would hold her own position, she must be 
eternally vigilant and absolutely inexorable. 

So, no more of fame for the present. The 
only heart that ever loved the little optimist 
as every woman wishes to be loved, has long 
since ceased to beat; her fortune is gone, 
and her health is ruined, but her optimism 
still weaves a halo of paling iridescence about 
her future. If she were a little stronger she 
would try again and succeed. She will stay 
in the city and support herself till she is able 
to give nursing another trial. She is not 
endowed with those attributes which seem to 
be necessary in a nurse, but she has other 
attributes which make it possible for her to 
be useful. Those persons who are most 
highly endowed must stand higher than 
others ; it is just that they should. But all 
i6 241 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

are endowed in some degree, and, in justice, 
should have some place in the social organism. 
All cannot be great painters, nor great in- 
ventors, nor great nurses. All cannot help 
the race in an equal degree, and therefore 
cannot enjoy an equal measure of gratitude 
and fame ; but all may help the race in some 
degree, and may have, in some measure, the 
rewards of usefulness. If all cannot find the 
same level, surely each may find his own 
level without pushing his fellows down. 

She is not seeking fame now. She only 
wants a living and the comforting assurance 
that she is earning it. There can be no 
difficulty in finding useful employment of 
some kind. The times are prosperous. The 
great city is full of activity. Surely she can 
take some part in it. Furthermore, she is 
living in the most highly civilized country in 
the world, among beings who have been 
taught for nineteen centuries to love their 
neighbors as themselves. If each one loves 
her as he loves himself, she can find a thou- 
242 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

sand openings in an hour. So she breathes 
out a tremulous little prayer to the Father, 
and in the morning she takes a cheap lodg- 
ing and begins to look for employment. 

She learns from a daily paper that fifty 
saleswomen are wanted in a large department 
store. She immediately applies for a position, 
but she finds many ahead of her. She must 
stand in a line and wait for her turn. As 
she moves slowly along with the line, she has 
time to notice that many of the applicants 
are extremely pretty, and suddenly she re- 
members that she has seldom seen a plain- 
looking saleswoman in this store. With a 
pang she realizes that her own beauty is gone, 
but that can surely not impair her chances 
of being employed. Her mind is alert, her 
character is unimpeachable, and she could do 
her work as well as any of those girls who 
are confidently smiling as they sign their 
applications at the manager's desk. She will 
not be rejected on account of her looks. 
That brusque man at the desk cannot be so 
243 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

sentimental as to prefer saleswomen simply 
because they are pretty. 

No, my dear optimist, he is not sentimen- 
tal, but he knows that personal attractions 
in a saleswoman have a distinct commercial 
value. He takes advantage of existing con- 
ditions. In days agone, the prettiness of 
these girls would have been hidden under 
the bushel of domesticity. It would have 
been wasted in attracting a husband and 
brightening a home and assisting its posses- 
sor to find her way to hearts that would have 
continued to love her after the decay of her 
prettiness. Since then the world has pro- 
gressed. The world is emancipated. The 
prettiness of these girls will help their em- 
ployer to put dollars in his tills. Customers 
will buy more goods from a pretty girl than 
they would from a plain girl who might be 
an equally competent saleswoman. 

Of course, the pretty girl does not get the 
money. Her employer gets that. But is it 
not just that he should ? He has hired that 
244 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

girl's prettiness and put it on exhibition be- 
hind his counter for commercial purposes, 
just as he exposes his wares. Prettiness in 
the old days could help a girl to get a living 
only by exposing her to the inconvenience of 
being loved and more or less monopolized by 
one man. Now she can sell her prettiness 
on the market to a corporation that does not 
want her heart, and will have no further use 
for her prettiness after all the money has been 
squeezed out of it. 

You will find some plain girls in the em- 
ploy of this house, but they either have spe- 
cially valuable endowments of some other 
kind, or were employed when the supply of 
prettiness was not equal to the demand. 

The optimist now stands before the man- 
ager, whose look of bored indifference grad- 
ually breaks into a cynical smile, the same 
smile that she saw on the faces of the sur- 
geon and his second assistant, the smile of a 
man who is reminded by the desperate dis- 
tress of another that he himself is still glad 
245 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

to be alive. He shoves an application form 
toward her, although he has, in his own 
mind, already rejected her, and he seems to 
enjoy the pitiful eagerness with which she 
signs her name. 

Then she goes home to her lodging to 
wait and rest and nurse her hope. She hears 
nothing of her application on the next day, 
and on the second day she returns to the 
store to learn her fate. 

After much trouble she gains an audience 
with the manager, who now tells her, with- 
out any further formality, that she will not 
do; and she staggers into the street without 
knowing how, and wanders endlessly without 
knowing where. 

What would you have ? The manager 
does not own the store. He himself is 
working for a salary, and if he does not use 
his utmost endeavor to procure saleswomen 
who will be most profitable to his employer, 
a manager with less heart and more acumen 
will be employed in his stead. Twenty en- 
246 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

vious subordinates are already scheming to 
get his place. 

Days go by, — days of dreary disappoint- 
ment and cruel rebuffs, — and Christmas is 
coming on apace. Shop windows are taking 
on a gay appearance; streets in the shopping 
district are crowded with pedestrians and car- 
riages ; a happy expectancy is in the air — a 
sort of anticipatory glow of gladness which 
will break into its full radiance only at Christ- 
mas. Surely in this time of universal glad- 
ness and good will, the little optimist will not 
be overlooked. 

She is not disappointed. In the middle of 
December she is employed in a big store that 
needs more saleswomen to meet the demands 
of the holiday trade. In the general thawing 
out of hearts which this season promotes, 
does not a manager's heart thaw out so that 
he becomes willing to employ a little optimist 
in spite of her inexperience and the loss of 
her good looks ? She thinks it does, and 
goes gladly to work. 

247 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

There are great crowds in the store, and 
there is much selecting of presents by per- 
sons who have much to say about the silly 
custom of giving presents at Christmas. 
The givers are generally burdened by the 
giving, and the recipients are seldom pleased 
with the gifts ; but when one knows one 
will receive something which one does not 
want, one must also give something which 
will not be wanted. 

The little optimist shudders. Is this what 
Christmas means to these people ? It is not 
what it has meant to her. 

The conversation among the customers goes 
on. One makes a shabby joke about letting 
the laundress wait till Christmas presents have 
been paid for. Another makes the same joke 
about the landlady. 

Then this season of intensified Christian- 
ity is the season of neglected obligations ! It is 
the season when the butcher, the baker,and the 
candlestick-maker may snap their fingers for 
their money till we get ready to pay them ! 
248 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

Well, yes ; but at this season of joy and 
gladness, when one loves one's fellow-man, 
if ever, must not one buy presents to show 
it, and to show that one Is not a mere selfish 
heathen ? Are not dead walls and magazine 
covers illuminated with advertisements gayly 
suggestive of the coming cheer, and sweetly 
reminiscent of Him who preached peace on 
earth and good will to men ? Are not the 
shop windows decorated, and the streets and 
sidewalks crowded, and the clerks busy, and 
the sleigh-bells jingHng, because some nine- 
teen centuries ago Christ was born ? 

My dear optimist, there may be some (I 
am sure there are) to whom this season 
means a warming of the heart toward one's 
fellow-beings ; to whom it brings a thousand 
tender memories sweeter than those awakened 
by any other season of the year — persons 
who find a joy In giving and a pleasure in 
receiving not to be measured In money. But 
the bustling activity in which you are now 
taking part is not the result of a doctrine of 
249 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

peace on earth and good will toward men ; it 
is not a joyful celebration of the birth of 
Him who preached that doctrine; it is the 
result of the skilful execution of an elaborate 
trick of commerce, whereby utterly useless 
goods can be sold at enormous profits and 
old goods brought forth from their hiding 
places and sold at advanced prices. You 
cannot see this ? No optimist can. But it 
is true. 

The little optimist is very tired in the 
evening, but she is happy. She is at last 
taking part in the world's activity. She has 
at last found her level, and can, in her 
humble way, be useful in the world. She 
is even growing stronger in spite of her hard 
work. At her counter she has made some 
friends who have been acute enough to see 
in her face the beauty which mere emaciation 
does not destroy, acute enough to read in 
that pale face a history of pathetic suffering 
made more pathetic still by the uncomplain- 
ing resignation with which it has been borne. 
250 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

There has been little time for confidences at 
her counter, but one lady has learned enough 
to become Interested and to want to help the 
optimist in the execution of her plans. The 
lady is connected with the management of a 
training school and has asked the little opti- 
mist to call on her. 

So the world grows suddenly bright again, 
and she becomes exceedingly happy. You 
see, all things come to him who knows how 
to wait. Is it not a dear old world after all ? 
There are kind hearts in it, and (there is no 
doubt about it) her prettiness is returning. 
There is an encouraging little suggestion of 
pink in her cheeks, especially in the after- 
noon. There is a brightness in the eyes that 
is really striking. It is true there is a cough, 
but it is growing better. Such coughs are 
always growing better. 

She stands before her mirror and arranges 
her hair in the prettiest manner she can in- 
vent. Yes, her prettiness is really returning, 
and the knowledge gives her pleasure so 

2^1 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

intense that she fears it springs from sinful 
vanity; but it is really due to an instinct that 
teaches any woman that her strongest weapon 
in the encounter with the world is an attrac- 
tive exterior. She can do something with 
brains if she has them, but if she has pretti- 
ness, she can often get credit for brains that 
she does not have; and in any case, whether 
she is " emancipated " or not, so long as there 
are men in the world, she can never accom- 
plish as much with brains as she can with a 
pretty face or a handsome figure. 

On Christmas Eve five hundred girls are 
discharged — the optimist among them. The 
holiday trade is over. The old goods have 
either been disposed of or will have to wait 
till the next anniversary of the Master's 
birthday improves the market. She is not 
yet strong enough to enter the new training 
school, and she goes trembling to her knees 
again. 

But why should I follow her sad history 
further? Why should I recall the pathetic 
252 



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details to the end ? Is it not the old story 
of the weak, whom the world loves to kick 
out of the way to make room for the strong ? 
Who cares for the weak and their infirmities ? 
To the wall with them, and then to the poor- 
house or the hospital. We will care for 
them there till they die, for we are Christians, 
but who wants them to live among men and 
perpetuate their weaknesses ? Let us have a 
strong race, a race of noble creatures who are 
able to withstand a hostile world or kick a 
cringing dog ! Let us, by all means, guard 
the race against corruption with those qualities 
that are of no present commercial value ! 

And yet, when I look back to my little 
optimist's palmy days, I cannot think the 
race would suffer if there were more like her 
in the world. I cannot think the battle goes 
against her because of her unfitness. When 
I see how hope revives within that broken 
heart and glows with undimmed lustre to the 
end (which is not long delayed) ; when I see 
the patient soul go out without a murmur at 
253 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

the treatment which it had received ; when I 
see on her dead face the stamp of something 
higher than what is called success could put 
there ; when I see the bitter grief of those 
whose love she never knew she had, I pay 
the silent tribute of a tear to her sublime 
philosophy of hope, and hope myself that in 
some way which labored logic cannot bring 
to light, that gentle soul will be rewarded. 

But when I see the cruel ignorance which 
optimism fosters in those who harbor it, and 
the brutal selfishness it hides in others, I am 
impelled to rend the pretty mask into a thou- 
sand fragments, and show beneath its rain- 
bow colors this pair of vampires that suck 
the blood of victims while they sleep. 

If instead of increasing the total amount 
of pain in the world by adding an unreal kind 
to the real kind, as the pessimists do ; and 
instead of concealing from our timid eyes 
the existence of real pain and injustice, as 
the optimists do, we should cast about for 
254 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 



methods of reducing the amount of pain that 
actually exists, we might find the work 
equally interesting and profitable. 

Here one is led to wonder whether it is 
possible to abolish pain ; and this leads one 
to inquire why pain is in the world at all. 

Those who believe that the world is con- 
trolled by a supernatural divinity that is not 
subject to the same natural and logical 
necessities that govern other beings, must 
believe that pain was deliberately and arbi- 
trarily introduced into the world by that 
divinity ; or that the divinity deliberately and 
arbitrarily permitted a malevolent spirit to 
introduce pain into the world ; or that the 
malevolent spirit was so powerful that it 
introduced pain into the world in spite of the 
divinity. There is no other possible suppo- 
sition. Either of the first two supposi- 
tions would imply that the divinity is cruel ; 
the last, that it is not omnipotent. Any of 
the suppositions would be discreditable to the 
divinity, and a reverent man who thinks 
255 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

about the matter is led to believe that any- 
possible conception of a supernatural divinity 
is wrong ; while an irreverent man who 
thinks about the matter is led to believe that 
there is no divinity at all. 

Those who do not think about the matter, 
but accept the dictum established by the 
automatic thinking of crowds, will, if they 
are reverent, believe that pain exists by the 
will or permission of the divinity, and that 
it will continue till it has been exterminated 
through some miraculous alteration of ex- 
ternal Nature or through some equally mirac- 
ulous alteration of the heart of man. The 
less reverent will continue to believe that 
man is the sport of a pitiless Nature that 
is so constituted that the race must suffer till 
it perishes. 

I perceive that I am thinking again, the 
Lonely Man mused. It is fortunate that no 
one is obliged to follow me, for people will 
forgive almost anything except compelling 
them to think. It would be laborious to my- 
256 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

self if it lasted long, but I perceive whither 
my thinking is leading me, and I also begin 
to perceive something like method in the 
capriciousness of my thoughts. 

Let us suppose that the divinity, of which 
we seem to catch fleeting glimpses in Nature, 
is inherent in Nature. Such a divinity could 
not make the sum of two and two anything 
but four. It could not make two hills with- 
out an intervening valley. It could not 
make a fire cold simply because some one 
happened to thrust his fingers into it. It 
could not suspend the operation of gravity 
because some one happened to fall over the 
balusters. It would be subject to the same 
eternal immutability of law, and to the same 
inexorable necessities of logic that govern 
everything else in Nature. We could, on 
the one hand, have no grounds for accusing 
such a divinity of cruelty because pain exists, 
and we should, on the other hand, have no 
excuse for passively awaiting an equitable 
adjustment of things in some future world. 
17 257 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

We should get into the habit of believing that 
if our existence is to be continued at all, it 
will be continued in some natural way, which 
will still leave us at the mercy of unfriendly 
conditions till we learn to adjust ourselves 
to them. We should, therefore, endeavor 
to cure what it is sometimes so difficult to 
endure. 

When we look about further to ascertain 
the cause of pain, we find that all the pain 
we suffer is the result either of our own igno- 
rance and selfishness or of the ignorance and 
selfishness of other people. One puts one's 
hand into a fire because one is ignorant of 
the unpleasant effect of fire on a hand. One 
learns what the effect is, and adjusts one's 
self to fire afterwards so as to avoid its unpleas- 
ant effects. One treads on a banana peel and 
falls to the sidewalk, cither because one does 
not know the banana peel is there, or because 
one is ignorant of a banana peel's peculiar 
property of reducing friction. One learns, 
and adjusts one's self to banana peels accord- 

258 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 



ingly. One steps into a trap, whether it con- 
sists of iron or an insidious habit, because 
one is ignorant either of its presence or of its 
deadly power. 

One commits a crime because one does 
not know that there is no escape from the 
just penalties of actual wrong-doing. Intel- 
ligence may permit one to believe that it is 
possible to escape the vengeance of man in 
this world and of God in the next, but it is 
the densest ignorance which leads one to 
believe that there is any escape from the 
torment of remorse and the loathing self- 
contempt that will without ceasing torture 
its victim as long as memory lives. It is 
the densest ignorance which leads one to 
believe that any vicarious sacrifice can pur- 
chase salvation from the penalties imposed 
by the only judge who is always just and 
never merciful — one's own self. And the 
man who is so impassive that he cannot feel 
these pains (if there really is such a man) is 
so dead already that an executioner could 
259 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

take nothing from him. Thus his punish- 
ment began before his crime in his inability 
to experience happiness as well as pain ; and 
this inability is the result of ignorance. 

If, after one has learned these things, one 
deliberately puts one's hand into a fire or 
treads on a banana peel, it is because one's 
own ignorance or selfishness, or the igno- 
rance or selfishness of other persons, has put 
a fire or a banana peel where it should not 
be, or has created conditions which make it 
necessary to ignore its presence. 

Thus, all causes of pain can be reduced 
to ignorance or selfishness ; and when we 
come to examine the latter we shall find 
that there is a kind of beneficent selfishness 
which is not a cause of pain, and that the 
selfishness which is a cause of pain, is itself 
the result of ignorance. 

Before a child learns that through its own 
selfishness it deprives itself of all the pleas- 
ures arising from the exercise of the altruistic 
instincts, it wants everything, and wants it 
260 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

wholly for itself. When it learns that there 
is a higher pleasure in the exercise of sym- 
pathy and generosity than there is in monop- 
oly, it becomes less selfish. It would no 
longer kill its baby sister to get the sister's 
rattle. When it grows into a youth and has 
learned still more of the pains of selfishness, 
and of the pleasures of generosity, the youth 
would not even kill his playfellows to gratify 
his selfishness. When he grows into a man, 
he may forget what he has already learned; 
but if he learns more of the penalties of 
selfishness, he will avoid, as far as existing 
conditions permit him to avoid, injuring any 
member of his family or of his circle of in- 
timate friends. The diminution of his harm- 
ful selfishness is thus brought about solely by 
an increase of knowledge. Selfishness itself 
is thus brought under the causality of igno- 
rance, which therefore appears to be the 
primary and natural cause of all pain. 

If ignorance is the natural cause of pain, 
as heat is the cause of evaporation, we cannot 
261 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

expect a natural divinity to remove the pain 
till the cause has been removed; and the 
only natural method of curing ignorance is 
through the acquisition of knowledge. 

But can one pretend to believe that there 
has not been a prodigious acquisition of 
knowledge by man ? It is true that there is 
much learning in the world, and there appears 
to be plenty of intelligence. People can 
solve the most intricate problems of mathe- 
matics, learn any number of languages, un- 
ravel the most complicated questions of logic, 
create the most wonderful inventions, and 
settle the most recondite questions of science 
and philosophy. Can these wonderful beings 
justly be said to be ignorant ? 

No, they are not ignorant of these things; 
but a banker who knows the current value 
of ten thousand different kinds of securities, 
may still not know that a burglar is drilling a 
hole in his safe. So far he is ignorant, and 
it would not offend him to tell him so if he 
is a truly wise and learned man. In the 
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THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

acquisition of all this learning, we may have 
overlooked some facts that might have en- 
abled us to make a happier use of it. 

But is it not a fact that the advance of the 
human race in knowledge and intelligence 
has been accompanied by an actual increase 
of pain ? 

Perhaps it has been. Some people say it 
has been; and yet, childhood is, in many 
cases, the most unhappy period of life, solely 
on account of its terrifying ignorance. But 
even if the popular belief is admitted to be 
true, this by no means implies that advance 
in intelligence has always been accompanied 
by increase of pain, nor that man's advance 
in knowledge has caused the increase of his 
pain, nor that a further advance in knowledge 
would not reveal the source of his pain and 
the means of relieving it. 

Among the inferior creatures advance in 
intelligence does not seem to have been ac- 
companied by increase of pain. On the 
contrary, progress seems to have been ac- 
263 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

companied by a relative increase of happiness, 
for a monkey certainly looks happier than an 
oyster ; and as we cannot communicate with 
either animal, we must be guided by appear- 
ances In both cases. Among such creatures 
an almost wholly selfish struggle is one of the 
chief means of advancement ; but while these 
creatures are not sufficiently intelligent to in- 
vent any other means of advancement, they 
are not sufficiently enlightened to appreciate 
or suffer those pains which hostile competition 
causes among civilized beings. Their igno- 
rance is so profound that these pains do not 
in any great measure exist for them. Being 
ignorant of the pains of selfishness, they re- 
main ignorant of the means of avoiding them ; 
but such pains as they are capable of appreci- 
ating they either learn to avoid or quickly 
succumb to without much suffering. 

Thus intelligence continued to advance, 

apparently without any relative increase of 

pain, till man was evolved ; and he has now 

advanced so far that he has become capable 

264 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

of acutely appreciating the pains of selfish- 
ness, without having advanced far enough 
to fully recognize the cause of his pain, and 
certainly v^^ithout having advanced far enough 
to perceive clearly that the cause is removable. 
Still less clearly does he understand how to 
remove it. 

Man has learned to recognize selfishness 
as a means of progress, and he has become so 
accustomed to the kind of selfishness by 
means of which he has progressed that he 
believes progress would be impossible with- 
out it. He knows that the increase of in- 
telligence wrought by selfish competition 
enables him to escape all the pains that 
he now knows how to escape, but he does 
not yet realize that the selfishness of his 
competition is the chief proximate cause of 
all the pain that remains. His intelligence 
is not the cause, but the condition of his 
pain. 

Now, the question arises : Will man ever 
acquire that intelligence which will enable 
265 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

him to escape from his selfishness and thus 
escape from pain ? 

He has already acquired it, but it is still in 
a nebulous form. He has the knowledge, as 
a slumberer who is not fully enough awake to 
cover himself has the knowledge, that the bed- 
clothes have slipped ofF. Man hopes, in an 
indistinct way, that the race will in some 
future age be released from its pain, but he 
does not know how the release will be accom- 
plished, nor why he hopes. He hopes, as a 
dreamer hopes, that he will grow warm, with- 
out realizing that he must awake and relieve 
his own discomfort if it is ever to be relieved 
at all. He has dreamed his dream of pain so 
long that he thinks he must always dream ; 
and when his slumber is so far disturbed that 
he partially wakes, and, through the phan- 
tasms of his dream, faintly sees the fleeting 
vision of the truth that would release him, he 
mutters uneasily in his slumber and grumbles 
that his painful sleep has been disturbed. 
The vision fades away, or, if it stays, its out- 
266 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

line quickly blends with the distorted prod- 
ucts of his dreaming fancy, and so, while 
the dream is altered, it still goes on. 

We all comprise this slumbering intelli- 
gence. Each one of us carries about with 
him a little fragment of undissolved mind 
with which he does such thinking as he does 
at all. The rest of our mentality is merged 
in the common mind that dreams, and when 
we lose our grip on the piece of mind that we 
try to keep, our mentality is wholly merged 
in the common mind, and we become auto- 
matons. No one can boast that his thinking 
is in any great degree his own, that it is not 
largely the suggested thinking of a dreaming 
race. But one may, for a brief moment, so 
far awake as to see that in this dreaming mind 
there is a vast ocean of intelligence that might 
dream a more reasonable dream if its individ- 
ual drops could occasionally segregate them- 
selves and think their own unbiased thoughts. 

They cannot do this now, but they would 
learn to do it if every man would take an 
267 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

hour now and then to try to think the jagged 
truth about anything his piece of mind can 
think about at all ; and if destiny may be sup- 
posed to concern itself with so small a matter 
as a lonely man's reflections, this is the goal 
to which destiny has guided these reflections. 
Our thinking might at first be mostly 
wrong, as mine has doubtless been, but that 
this method would at last lead to true think- 
ing, there is no doubt. Thus we might learn 
the meaning of the Golden Rule, which we 
shall hardly learn in any other way ; and till 
we learn to think so clearly about all things 
that we can see the word Confucius and the 
Galilean have spelled in their two versions 
of the Golden Rule, and strip that word of 
all the grotesque meanings that the dreaming 
fancy of a slumbering race has woven into 
it, we shall not escape from pain, and the 
heart of man will not be satisfied. It is not a 
heart man needs ; he has that now. He needs 
a wakened mind to teach him how to use it. 



268 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

The rushing wind drives the sleet against 
the window and reminds the Lonely Man of 
his surroundings. The hour is late, his pipe 
has long since grown cold, and the fire, blink- 
ing its bright eyes in the asbestos grate, seems 
to whisper in its saucy voice, " Who cares 
for you or your reflections ? Is iiot a pound 
of matter worth a ton of thought ? Give the 
world something which it can ride in, or talk 
through, or laugh at, and you will be ac- 
counted great. Material things are the things 
that endure. I am still here. You can see 
me and feel me ; but where are all your fine- 
spun thoughts now ? Can any man see 
them with his eyes or feel them with his 
hands ? The city is sleeping in happy ob- 
livion of you and your thoughts. It will 
sleep so to-morrow night and the night after. 
Aye, it and the world will lull themselves to 
sleep every night for many centuries with the 
sweet conviction that things are as they should 
be and that wise men will leave them so. 
"What matters it that individual thinking 
269 



REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY MAN 

might bring the millennium a few centuries 
sooner than it will otherwise come ? Has 
not your friend Confucius said, 'Thought 
without learning is perilous ' ? The Millen- 
nium will come of itself — if it come at all. 
What matters it, then, that Confucius also 
said, ' Learning undigested by thought is labor 
lost ' ? " 

But the Lonely Man perceives that the 
voice of the fire is the voice of a false wit- 
ness and an unwise counsellor, and that the 
blinking eyes of the fire are the eyes of a 
vain coquette who would entice him into for- 
getfulness of serious matters for the gratifi- 
cation of her own vanity. For he knows 
that others besides himself are thinking to- 
night — many others — hundreds of thou- 
sands of them. Perhaps they are not thinking 
as he has thought. Perhaps they are think- 
ing more wisely and perhaps less wisely. 
But they are thinking their own thoughts, at 
least, and no man or number of men can 
stop their thinking. It will go on till the 
270 



THE RELEASE FROM PAIN 

thousands become millions, and the thoughts 
become more and more nearly true ; and 
then things will become more nearly as they 
should be. 

As for him, he has had his reflections. 
For once he has been as wide awake as it is 
possible for him to be ; and now, when his 
brief season of exile is over, he will return 
to his little crowd and melt lovingly into it, 
and then, perhaps, he will think as it thinks. 
It is so easy to persuade ourselves that in 
thinking, as in dressing, he was right who said, 

"Though wrong the mode, comply j more sense is 
shown 
In wearing others' follies than our own." 

And yet, if he should ever again so far awake 
as to think at all, he will still believe that it 
is well to think one's own thoughts occasion- 
ally even though they be wrong. 

THE END 



//i 



4 



89 




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